


It's Better With You Here

by tori1116



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Green Arrow (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Red Hood/Arsenal (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Age Difference, And Now Both Members of The Batman Inc, But They're Cool with Them, Consensual Sex with Both Parties Over Seventeen, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced HIV/AIDS, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Interdependency Instead of Codependency, Jason and Roy Having Their Own Life In LA, Jason and Teen Roy Are Partners, Jason's 6"2, Language, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Mentions of Navajo Culture, Mentions of The General Psychological Traumas From The Vigilante Life, Mia Dearden Is Not Speedy, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Character Death, Pre-52 Characterization, Pre52-Adult Jason, Roy's a Tech Nerd, Sharing a Bed, Size Difference, Teen Arsenal Roy from Young Justice, Teen Roy's about 5"8, They're Independence of Their Fams, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Visiting the Families, and Pretty Much A Twig Even In Comparison to Clone (Regular) Roy, as I Distinctly Remember Him to Be Before They Shortened Everyone While De-aging Them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:28:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28956462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tori1116/pseuds/tori1116
Summary: “Why would you two sleep in the same room if you aren’t--”“We aren’t,” hurled out Jason gruffly, flying right away to annoyance once he had caught on to what the guy was saying.#This a sequel to my Pre-52 Jason/YJ original Roy storyDouble-Edged, but if you haven't read that and don't wanna go through the long, heavy main story, I'm sure this can still pretty much work as a standalone for you.All you need to know before reading this is that Jason has partnered up with teen Arsenal Roy and now they're living together in LA and also members of the Batman Inc.
Relationships: Background Dinah Lance/Oliver Queen, JayRoy - Relationship, Roy Harper/Jason Todd
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

The pale light of the morning sun crept in through the sheer curtain in the room, waking him up slowly and gently on the softness of the luxury silk sheet he’s never entirely used to but could certainly enjoy. 

While he had managed to maintain lying on his side during his sleep, the smaller body which had initially been lying back to back with him on the other side of the bed was now pressing itself against him, its flesh arm holding him loosely from behind.

With a familiar stir in the south of his stomach which he wasn’t awake enough to recognize, he drew over toward the alluring warmth behind his back, catching a slender leg between his own legs, his arm stretching out and pulling in the other more closer to himself.

The arm of flesh around him shifted to rest its hand on his back almost immediately. The bottom of his clothes had been rolled up slightly in his sleep; the cybernetic hand squeezed in the narrow between their bodies gave a kiss of cold on the exposed skin of his waist.

The stir under his stomach grew as the cold tingled his bare skin. His mouth gave a quiet sigh of pleasure.

Not yet opening his eyes, he lowered his head, to graze his longing lips on the soft scrape of the buzzed red hair. His arm around Roy drew its hand up and down on Roy’s back softly and lazily, then further down he reached.

“Hmm...”

A sweet little noise sounded from the deep of Roy’s throat, as Jason’s hand stretched down onto his backside and took a slight, thoughtless grasp of the cheek. The slender leg between Jason’s own legs stirred and pressed its thigh higher up against the bulge between his own thighs through the thin fabric of his pants, giving it a bit of the wonderful pressure that he needed more of-- _much, much more_ \--

His body stiffened as he snapped completely and awfully awake.

He had got to _stop_ waking up in a position like this, Jason grunted to himself, mildly mortified, then relaxing slightly after a quick glance at Roy.

Luckily, the kid didn’t seem to be waking up just yet. It was tough enough to find himself waking up in this sort of situation with a sleeping Roy; he wouldn’t want to know what the hell might’ve happened if he woke up with the redhead awake already.

It was a good thing that he was conditioned to the littlest of sleeping and had always been the one who woke up from bed first. His sleep had improved a great deal during the recent year, but over five hours of sleep had been pretty much beyond imagination in between school and his Robining in his teenage sidekick days, and he hadn’t even been much of sleeper before that, used to always be ready to jump up at the slightest sound of troubles and never let himself sleep too deeply for long while he had been on his own on the streets.

Ignoring that thing inside him (not a thing of integrity or even intelligence, obviously) that wasn’t too happy to leave his position on the bed or let go of that firm, nice piece of muscle that his hand had taken hold of, he removed his grip from the kid, careful not to wake Roy as he disengaged himself from him, and stole off the bed in some swift seconds.

There’s still at least an hour before Alfred would be serving breakfast. 

The dinner party held under the pretext of celebrating the current success of the new Batman Inc last night was all right, minus the ordinary bickers between everyone and everyone. Roy had certainly had fun getting a rise out of Damian and enjoyed himself in his chat with Luke Fox, who had got a lot of informative thoughts in engineering science to share with him; and Jason had also had a far better time than he would’ve ever imagined having in this place again with the group of people, most of which he had barely even known and the rest he did know he wouldn’t be so much as having a cup of coffee with but rather shooting at less than a year ago. 

It was possibly the biggest nicest dinner that Alfred (the architect behind this little “reunion”, no doubt; Bruce might seem to be attempting to improve his interpersonal skill lately, but his demon kid would probably become the dad of his own demon kid before he would ever spontaneously think about gathering everyone up for a home party like that) had ever had the joy in preparing at the manor for a real long time.

No one had seemed that they might try to stab themselves in the leg or stab someone else to get the hell out of the dinner, Bruce had smiled some genuine smiles, even Damian had showed some appreciation for the experience, however reluctantly--so it was only natural that it had been cut short by a sudden emergency call about a massive prison break at Blackgate right before dessert (“--A more barmy fool might suggest you to enjoy the rest of this hitherto pleasant evening at home and trust that the city would manage to regain the ability it had once demonstrated in surviving on its own without any special aids in the olden days for the brevity of one short night, while a less barmy fool would see the asininity in hoping that you would at least wait until _after_ you enjoy the dessert, that a moderated old fool such as myself had perhaps spent a mite too much of his time on,” had uttered the butler wryly, with a disapproving glance at Bruce’s set of dessert, which the man had decisively left untouched on the dinner table as he had been setting off to change for the action and naturally bringing away the entire group with him). 

By the time they had secured the pen and recaptured every escaped jailbird throughout the city and put them back in their cage, it had already been about two in the morning, so eventually he and Roy had decided to stay the night as Alfred had suggested.

Two set of spare sportswear had been brought for them to sleep in shortly after he and Roy had made their way into the room; the civvies they had originally worn to the manor last night had been taken away along with their work suits for cleaning, which, judging by the fact that he didn’t see them all clean and folded in a neat pile anywhere in the room, were probably still in the laundry at the moment--Even the Jeeves needed his sleep, though Jason had never actually found the old man sleeping or even taking a catnap during his entire time at the manor; and after the great sweat he had worked up for the earlier dinner, it was only normal that the old man would rather save himself the pain of washing piles of dirty clothes and armors in the deep of the night and left the chores for the morning.

After freshening up in the bathroom, Jason went out to the gym downstairs for a routine exercise alone while the little Red remained in sleep.

He had always enjoyed working out, and had never had any problem with the fact that he had had to spend at least twenty hours a week in physical training to keep himself in the right shape for the job while he had been wearing his old “wings”. It didn’t really quite give him the same kick he would get in the field, but it had still made him feel good--working his muscles and building himself a perfectly strong body in the gym, it used to make him feel like a champ, like nothing could take him down, back before his death; then right after he had returned, he had just kind of needed it, to raise himself to his strongest, to be able to avenge himself, be able to trust that he wouldn’t get put down again, or have anything important taken away from him again, not by his own physical inadequacy.

It was possible that he had been somewhat overly obsessed at building strength at the earlier point in his post death life. He didn’t feel like he was any more obsessed than anyone who had ever been “Batized” now; still, he would love to keep himself in perfect shape and had continued to work out almost every day.

Lately, he had been doing a lot of his workout in the morning, when he wasn’t staying in bed.

“You’re up early,” said Grayson, who had also stayed the night at the manor, from the door of the gym, just as Jason had moved away from the power rake and was lifting himself up on the still rings. “Trouble sleeping?”

“Eh, just got kinda bored of that after sleeping in the dirt for six months,” he nonchalantly replied. “You’re up early yourself. What is it, Dickie Bird, got some nice babe in Blüd to hurry back to?”

“A staff meeting, actually, found a new day job as a gymnastic teacher at a community centre just some days ago.”

“What, the BPD won’t take you back?”

“It’s probably better if I don’t go back,” a sense of pensiveness came to Grayson’s voice. “Being a cop just needs too much of the time and energy I don’t have while still doing good with my night job. I got real lucky that I didn’t kill myself the last time trying to do both. Now at the community centre I only have to work a few hours a day, zero money, but it helps keep the kids off the streets and spare the world some future criminals.” 

Jason hummed at that. “I can never get why you’d want to bother with a day job.”

“So you never thought about maybe there’s more to life than this crime fighting business? What do you and Roy do at day? Just sit around and stare each other in the eyes until sundown?”

“It’s the old man’s rule to work at night, that doesn’t apply to me. Roy and I work whenever we want to work. And Roy usually just spends his time taking care of our equipment or coming up with some new gadgets when we aren’t out working, or, you know, we train? So we don’t look like a couple of lemons at work?”

Grayson sniffed at him with mild sarcasm. “And that’s all you guys ever do off work--More support work and training.”

Or they just hung out at home watching TV, or they strolled around on the streets of Los Angeles whose entire construction they had come to know by heart at this point from their many hiking and driving and swinging between rooftops in exploration over the city since it had become their turf over half a year ago, or they sometimes went to the nearest secluded beach to recharge--both figuratively and literally for Roy, who had converted the original electric battery in his cybernetic arm into a solar battery connected to the transparent PV cells coated over the shell of his arm that could collect energy anytime at day to keep the weapon system in his arm online just by bathing under the sun.

There’s a whole solar power system at their warehouse in LA which the kid had practically spent all of their money on shortly after they had moved in--Take the kid over a thousand miles away off the green, but couldn’t take the green out of the kid; not that he had any objection about going green with Roy (in the ecological sense only, not in the sense that he was now Green Arrow friendly. He knew that Roy was cool with the man now, but he still didn’t feel any more fond of that old GA-hole than the old GA-hole felt for him), and it’s not like he’s actually aching for the money anyway.

He and Roy had earned themselves back more than the solar system had cost pretty quickly from raiding an underground casino owned by Suzie Su, one of the biggest (no pun intended) gang leader in Chinatown who had, with a not very light heart, accepted their proposal for a business relationship with them just recently and was now helping them keep the other LA gangs in check while providing them with information in the underworld as well as the money which they weren’t getting any from joining the Batman Inc.

Bruce didn’t think of the Inc as a “business”, and for that reason didn’t really pay any of the Inc members for their work. If anyone asked, the old man sure wouldn’t hesitate to write a paycheck. Nonetheless, Jason had never thought about asking him; he didn’t want Bruce’s money and he definitely didn’t need it. He and Roy could easily make their own money the same way he had always been doing since his return from death, by ripping off criminals, or owning their business--If all went well in LA, he and Roy might even be able to make themselves the head of a unified gang one day, where every criminal had to work under their rules for their own good and profits just as Suzie was doing right now.

They couldn’t lock every scum in jail and they couldn’t kill them, it seemed to Jason that the most logical solution for him and Roy to truly tidy up their turf and not spend the rest of their life in the constant repetition of cleaning up filth in a mudhole like Gotham was that they controlled the criminals themselves.

Not bothering to tell Grayson more about what he and Roy might have been doing in their off time or on time, which was their own business just as Grayson’s business was his own, Jason continued his acrobatic exercise in the gym, swinging himself up and down on the still rings a few times, then sprung out into the air, turning a somersault, and landed down steadily on the parallel bars with a flawless fluidity in his movement that even a former Boy Wonder had to agree was awesome.

“Not bad,” remarked Grayson agreeably, in the manner of a dick, “won’t hurt to put in a bit more grace though.”

Jason let out a mild snort, pushing him up into a handstand on the parallel bars before he tossed a mocking glance at Grayson.

“Sure, man. I would definitely remember to work on my ‘grace’, if I ever decided to stuff myself into full body tights with swanky stripes or sequins, and go work in a _circus_.”

“Too bad the Haly isn’t around anymore, I’m sure they could use a _tosser_ ,” the guy easily returned, then he paused for a beat. 

Apparently thinking again that Jason was up early because he didn’t have any sleep last night, the guy said to him in a thoughtful voice, “I can see why you might find it hard to sleep in here, in your old room. I didn’t really sleep much either, the first time I came back and spent the night in my old room since I’d moved out to New York, I mean. It hadn’t been that long, it had only been a couple of years...”

The couple of years when _Jason_ had been here, obviously. He couldn’t remember the guy had ever stayed a night at this place; the guy had hardly even stepped foot inside the manor during his time as Robin.

“--Only been a couple of years, but everything just felt so different,” the guy was telling him, “The bed was just so much bigger, so much softer, so not covered up in dirty clothes than the bed in my old New York apartment, and when I lay down on that big, comfortable bed, I just couldn’t help but remember thinking that it’s got to be the biggest, comfiest bed I’ve ever slept on when Bruce had first taken me in, and all of a sudden I felt like I wasn’t Nightwing--like I haven’t changed or grown up at all during that last couple of years, like I was still Robin, still a kid.”

“Nice sharing,” responded Jason with bland indifference, turning to stand on one hand on the parallel bars. “Who the hell would’ve thought that the great Dick Man would’ve also got _issues_ like the commoners--imagine how it might rock my world if I’ve learned about this _before_ I died.” 

“Is there an off switch to that?” Grayson retorted in a dry voice.

“There used to be, in the shape of a crowbar, I think.”

“God, I hate the death joke.” 

A wry smirk moved Jason’s lips. He liked making the death joke; the death wasn’t something so terrifying to him that he could make jokes of, nor was the crowbar, nor the Joker.

He could handle the death, he could handle being beaten into a pulp by a clown; but he could never let himself be turned into a “victim”, never would he let himself be seen as that “pitiful little kid who had gotten killed”, and no one would see him as that when he was making jokes out of his own death, when he was wearing the hood that he had taken from the clown just as he had taken the clown’s joke and claimed it his own. 

The expression on Grayson’s face changed back to solemnity as he started again slowly, “I know I haven’t been much of a brother for you. But things are different now, Jason, we’re different now, we’re all here. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t talk to each other--not about work, but personal stuff that could help us to know each other better--there’s no reason that we shouldn’t try to be the family we’re supposed to be.”

“Oh my, you just got so addicted to the gig while you’ve been big-brothering the other two, now you’re trying to big-brother me,” Jason grunted, “Why couldn’t something just happen and get me out of this already? Where’s Pennywise’s ugly brother when you need him?”

“Come on, you’re working in the same team with us, you came back to join us at a dinner, you just spent a night in the ‘family house’. Is it really so impossible that we could be a family for real?”

An ironic look passed Jason’s face.

“We have a very different definition of family,” he replied, still holding himself upside down with his hand on one side of the parallel bars.

Seeing that Grayson was clearly going to argue, he flung himself off the bars into standing upright on the floor, looking at the guy directly as he added on in a calm, sober attitude, “Believe it or not, I’m not shitting you, man. I’m not trying to play the devil’s advocate, I’m just telling you as it is. We have very different definitions of a lot of things and family is just one of those. You’re a circus boy, and I’m pretty sure that in the circus everybody always lives and eats and works together as one big family. You’re used to having a big family, used to having unrelated siblings and aunts and uncles and all that. You’re taught that family is important, you think family’s important. Not everyone’s been taught the same, or thinks the same.”

“So you don’t think family is important?”

“Family can be a real bummer, ‘bro’, I think you and I both know that; and we both know that we’re only family these days because I’m being a ‘good boy’ and playing by the rules.”

“A ‘good boy’,” Grayson puffed out an amused sniff. Then he moved his head briefly. “Family _can_ be a bummer, and I guess you’re right, we don’t have the same view about a lot of things; but for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re back, Jay; and anyway, it’s only been six months. We wouldn’t even be able to have a conversation without it turning into a fight six months ago, and now we’re talking without trying to hit each other,” the guy stretched his mouth into a smile, “Things can change.”

Jason didn’t share the guy’s optimism any more than he shared his view; it was kind of nice to be optimistic, though, and a lot of things had indeed changed a good deal these days, he supposed.

Lifting the corner of his mouth into a smirk, he asked casually in reply, “Does that mean now I’ve got a get-out of-jail-free card? You and the rest of our happy fam won’t try to get me arrested but just coddle me with unconditional love if I stain our good family’s name by out slaying criminals again?”

“No, we’re still going to stop you, but as your family,” answered Grayson most logically with a plain face. Afterward he paused to regard Jason with curious eyes, mused a little before he asked, “What about Arsenal?” 

“What about Arsenal?”

“Do you think of the little A as your family?”

“Roy’s my partner.”

Grayson nodded his head at the thoughtless answer.

“Right, of course, stupid question,” said the guy with a chuckle to himself, “it’s way too soon for you two to move on to the ‘family stage’, isn’t it? How long has it been anyway? It couldn’t be too long, I mean, you guys only met a little bit over a year ago. You never said anything, so I always thought you guys are just close, I never would’ve imagined...”

“What,” Jason glared at him; what the hell the guy was talking about?

The guy knitted his brows together in bemusement, as if he thought that Jason should’ve somehow understood his gibberish.

“Well aren’t you guys...you know...It’s just, I heard you tell Alfred that you and Roy could both sleep in your room when Alfred said he’d prepare the room next to your old room for the kid last night. Why would you two sleep in the same room if you aren’t--”

“We _aren’t_ ,” hurled out Jason gruffly, flying right away to annoyance once he had caught on to what the guy was saying.

He didn’t really think when he had told Alfred that Roy could sleep with him last night; he hadn’t even been thinking when he had agreed to stay the night in his old room last night.

It didn’t occur to him that it might be a pain to return to the old room after all these years, until he had stepped inside with Roy and his time in there had gushed back over him. “So _this_ is how it feels like to sleep on some real money,” had uttered Roy in playful wonderment, flopping down beside Jason on the luxurious softness of the silk after they had each cleaned themselves up and moved on to bed last night.

The voice of the redhead had drawn him out slightly from that not so pretty place in his own mind he had lost himself in while sitting on his old bed in his old room. “--When I die, I want the lining of my coffin to be made of this same material. If I’m gonna sleep forever, this is how I should sleep.”

His eyes had glanced down at the redhead lying flat on his own back beside him. “I thought we’re both going to have a cremation when we die.”

“Yeah, right, that’s probably better,” Roy had agreeably replied, sliding up his flesh arm and bending it under his buzzed head. “--No bone left for the _chʼį́įdii_ to linger.”

A look of bewilderment had appeared on the face of Jason, who didn’t speak any Navajo language. “The what?” 

“The chʼį́įdii. The ghost, the evil spirit,” the kid had explained to him, “The chief of the tribe used to tell me that there’s nothing evil in dying, it’s just the nature of things, and we aren’t supposed to return after we die--When a person passes away, everything bad about them will leave their body through their last breath, that’s the chʼį́įdii. It lingers on the body of the deceased or their personal stuff, and if you’re not careful and run into it, it’ll follow you and bring you harm; that’s why we always bury away the personal stuff of our dead or just destroy the stuff, and we never dig up our dead. We aren’t even supposed to visit them at their burial site, because if we do, we’d disturb the dead and bring them back with us.”

“No one had told _me_ that before I dug myself out of my own grave,” Jason had rejoined with a faint snort to himself; then after a space he had continued, his voice deepened, “...If the bad stuff stays and becomes the chʼį́įdii, what happens to the “good stuff” about the person when they die? There’s a heaven for you guys?”

“I don’t think so; I think we just sort of disappear when we die, returning to Mother Nature.”

Jason had hummed briefly in acknowledgement. “So it’s only the bad that stays.” Tossing a glance at Roy, he had stretched the corner of his mouth wryly, “You better run, little Red. For all you know, I could be a chʼį́įdii, a spirit of evil, the bringer of harm.” 

“I don’t believe you are,” had answered Roy in a soft, easy voice, his green eyes gazing up into Jason’s eyes. “You certainly can’t be if you don’t believe it. And anyway, chʼį́įdii’re like ghost, they aren’t corporal. You’re not a ghost, you’re more like a zombie, not the lousy, generic kind, but the kind like Ed, you know, from Shaun of the Death.”

“What do you mean _Ed?_ ” Jason had objected gravely, “I’m totally that guy from Warm Bodies, except hotter.”

“You know, with all my time in the crazy heat of the Zone and now LA, my sense of “hot” is a little too numb for me to tell if you’re right, big guy, but I can say you’re definitely larger,” the redhead had snickered, “--in the size of _ego_.”

After a laughing snort and a brief “little arse” at Roy in return, Jason had moved to turn off the light in the room. The green eyes had smiled back at him in the dark as he had lain down on his left side near Roy on the bed.

It would’ve been nice to stay on that side; it wouldn’t have been smart, though--With a quiet “goodnight” to Roy, he had rolled onto his other side farther from the redhead, who had returned his goodnight just as quietly before shifting around as well, his back to Jason’s.

In his last couple of weeks in the manor, Jason had hardly had any sleep in his room, always staring into the dark, fearing to be kicked out of the big house, aching to get out of the big house which had become more and more like a correctional facility to him at that time.

He had never thought he would miss that crappy little rathole of a rental room at the back of a crack house that he had paid the owner of the building an affordable place to stay in during his days on the streets; only near the end of his life in the manor, he had found himself beginning to miss it, the freedom of having to answer to no one but himself, the complete independence of being his own man, the pride in knowing that he could survive all on his own by nothing at all except his own smarts and talents, knowing that he was smart and competent enough to not become a prey to anybody, not like the countless preys who had been exploited or assaulted or killed on the streets in all manner of ways.

The pride that had been the single most vital sustenance to him, that he had been living on, that had separated him from the “victims”; that had been the one and only important thing he had gotten left in his life then and he would’ve gladly chosen death than to have it taken away.

Like Grayson had suspected, he had also felt that he might not be able to sleep again in his old room at the manor at first; but soon as he had lain down on the bed last night, he had drifted off into a full, sound sleep and not turned awake until the sun had arrived as he would easily do at home.

It didn’t feel much different from home with Roy lying alongside him on the bed.

The old base Jason had previously been living alone in Gotham had only had one bed. He had been sharing his bed with Roy since the kid had first stayed with him in that old base over a year ago, and they had both liked sleeping together on the same bed. It had never occured to either of them that they should get more than one bed when they had resettled in their new base in LA.

Jason had never thought there’s anything weird about that. He didn’t think him and Roy sleeping together in his room might give anyone any idea; no one had seemed to pay any attention to their talking with Alfred when the Jeeves had suggested him and Roy to stay the night before. He didn’t think anyone had noticed that they had slept in the same room, or thought anything about it. If Alfred had thought it weird that the two of them should sleep together, he certainly didn’t show it last night.

From the door of the gym, Grayson regarded him questioningly, “So you haven’t been sleeping with the kid?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, _Dick_ ,” Jason gritted his teeth a little; “He’s _sixteen years old_. We shared a bed, we didn’t _do_ anything.”

The guy held out his hands shortly in a pacifying manner. “Hey, take it easy, I’m not gonna judge you if you do. I mean, yeah some people may have problems with that with you being...what, six years?--older than him. But I don’t know, it’s not like it’s _murder_. As long as the little guy knows what he’s doing, that’s probably not so bad. He’s not really a little kid anyway, he’s a sixteen-years-old teenager--Plenty of teenagers have been having sex with each other at this age already, and I can say for sure that a lot of them have fantasized about being with a hot, older person at least once. _You_ certainly did at his age, according to a couple of my old red-haired lady friends. He’s too young for someone at _my_ age for sure, but I can get why if you’re attracted to him. The Roy _I_ grew up with had definitely attracted some attention at his age.”

“He’s not _Harper_ ,” Jason flung back roughly, “and I don’t need your approval because I don’t think of him like that.”

Afterward he strode up across the floor, brushing past Grayson on his way out of the gym without a glance at the guy, who followed him briefly through the door.

Whatever else the guy was going to say to him vanished in his half-open mouth, as he found Jason suddenly stopping dead before him right outside the gym room.

The expression on Grayson’s face flashed from confusion to embarrassment, once he had seen Roy standing in the hallway in front of Jason and him. “Oh, umm, hey,” Grayson bashfully greeted the kid.

How long had he been standing here? Jason stared flat at his partner with somewhat anxious eyes.

“Hey,” Roy greeted Grayson back, his face bland and his voice casual. “You two been working out?” his buzzed red head made a slight motion toward the gym. “What is it, exactly? Is it like some sort of matins for you people? Did the Batble say that everyone has to wake up early to do some morning exercise almost everyday as the Bat Lord commanded?”

“Not me,” Grayson chuckled, “I was just walking by when I saw this guy burning some calories in the gym. He does this almost every morning?”

“I don’t even remember the last time I woke up and found him on the bed in the morning,” replied Roy briefly, not meeting Jason’s stare. “Well, I was just trying to figure out which way is breakfast,” he continued, “I’m pretty sure there’s some in this place, but I just got lost finding it. This place makes the old Queen Mansion look like a cabin. How does Prince Teenyan get around this maze? On the back of Alfred?”

“Hey that kid learned to kill since he’s three, according to himself. I’d be more careful with my mouth around him if I were you,” said Grayson after snuffing out a laughing snort. “And I can assure you that Alfred is way too busy to be carrying him around.”

Roy raised his eyebrow in a skeptical manner. “What’s the _cat_ so busy about?”

A laugh escaped from Jason’s mouth, notwithstanding the fact that he still wasn’t entirely sure if the redhead had heard anything he and Grayson had said before and was a little uneasy about it.

“Good one,” he grinned at Roy, who flashed him a smirk in response, while Grayson was heaving a sigh to himself as if dreading the possibility of the baby demon challenging the redhead to a duel at the breakfast table soon.

Some coffee and food had already been made when all three of them found Alfred, the _butler_ , inside the kitchen. 

Having brought them each a set of breakfast on the table in the kitchen, the old butler continued his preparation for more food at the kitchen counter. 

Shortly after Jason and Roy had sat down and started to eat with Grayson at the breakfast table, the baby demon showed up. “--Pennyworth, haven’t I told you to get pest control here first thing in the morning?” began the brat coldly with a click of his tongue, not at all happy at seeing that Jason and Roy were still here.

“Glad to see you’re still as charming in the morning as always, your smallness,” returned Roy in a sarcastic tone.

Not sparing a glance at the redhead, the brat moved his eyes to Jason. “You’re right to keep him, Todd, this ginger imbecile makes even you seem tolerable.”

Jason lifted the corner of his mouth into a slight smile. “If only there’s anything in the world that could make _you_ tolerable--Oh wait, there’s that thing called laryngectomy.”

“Tim and the girls are smart to go back to their own places last night,” spoke Grayson dryly to himself while munching his toast, “This is exactly like the circus, except for the smell, and the fact that the people at the big-top are usually more pleasant to each other.”

“I feel obligated to remain all of you young gentlemen that brawling in any way at mealtimes is, without exception, forbidden,” stated Alfred with a hint of warning, as he finished Damian’s set of breakfast, which the kid brought away presently to eat at the main dining room where he wouldn’t be “bothered by the pests”.

Bruce the sheer night creature didn’t show up until after Alfred was done preparing the last set of breakfast for him and went to wake him up in his master bedroom. 

There’s nothing for Jason and Roy to do in Gotham. Right after they had finished their breakfast and picked up their washed clothes from Alfred, they flew back to LA in the Batjet in less than an hour.

Since neither of them had actually flown a jet before, Alfred had come along to make sure that they didn’t kill themselves in a plane crash, and also he felt somewhat doubtful that the two of them would actually return the jet to the cave by autopilot and not try to keep the thing to themselves in LA.

Properly infatuated with the jet and a little jealous that Jason had gotten to fly it (“Hey I’m older, and I’ve flown some copters before, and you don’t even have a driver license,” said Jason reasonably, seating himself down on the pilot seat, as Roy sulkily asked why he couldn’t fly the thing), the redhead asked Alfred to leave the jet with them for a bit longer after the plane had landed on an open space close to their warehouse in LA, so he could take it out for a little joyride himself.

The kid was positively beaming with satisfaction as he successfully brought the bird up in the sky with Jason sitting on the co-pilot seat and a wary Alfred on the back.

“Ollie never let me fly the old Arrowplane; he’s gonna hate it when I tell him I flew the _Batjet_ ,” said Roy with a lopsided smile on his face, standing and watching the jet leave after they had landed on the ground again and returned the jet for Alfred to fly back to Gotham. 

In a moment the plane disappeared into the clouds; as the two of them began to walk back to their base, the kid musingly continued, “You know, I kinda forgot how awesome it is to have our own plane.”

Jason shifted a sideways glance at him. “‘Are you thinking about getting _our_ own plane?”

“I don’t know, how much money have we got?”

“Adding in the profit from Suz this month? Maybe enough for a small, normal model if you give up your robot; but not the least enough for a nice, special model unless you give up the robot _and_ sell our bike.”

“Then we’re not getting our own plane, I guess,” Roy replied resignedly in a grumble, not at all willing to give up either the bike or the robot which he had started to build not long after he had finished remodeling Jason’s old muscle bike into a super muscle bike with security system, remote-controlled auto-driving system, transparent bulletproof shield features and transformation function that could change the bike into a normal, civilian sport bike in some quick seconds. 

Much like the renovation of their home, the modification of the bike had cleared away a good deal from their offshore bank account, and thus, pretty much condemned them to sit on couch in commercial flights for a considerable while should they travel out of the country on their own; but the Red Beauty they had got now was badass and Jason sure didn’t mind if the redhead had been spending their money a little bit too quickly.

He didn’t believe that the kid used to spend much back in his time with GA. It was most likely that Roy was somewhat careless about money now, because their money was easy criminal’s money and he could splash it all he wanted without guilt on the good, serviceable stuff such as the technical improvement of their base and work equipment that was a great pleasure for him to throw his time and energy into and was basically the only thing he would ever spent money on. 

While Jason had learned to appreciate nice stuff as well as playing rich during his time at the manor, Roy didn’t seem to have adopted much taste for luxury from the old Queen, who had been a millionaire then just as he had once again become some time ago. The redhead had never spent money on any kind of luxury experience; other than mechanical parts and tools, he had hardly even bought himself anything.

As much as Jason loathed the rich, the helplessness in poverty was something he wouldn’t care to relieve, and he knew perfectly that money was power. He liked the feeling of having money to spend and kind of enjoyed dressing nice and spending money on outfits and stuff. It was all too easy to be put down and treated like filth when one was dressing like a bum. He had got some finery at home that he could put on anytime to play the proper rich guy, and he had also got some nice shoes and enough nice, casual clothes to fill his side of the closet. Meanwhile, Roy had had exactly one pair of sneakers which he had been wearing everyday since they had first partnered up in Gotham until Jason had gotten him a new pair, and his side of the closet was practically empty with only the couple of clothes he had gotten himself the same time he had bought his old sneakers in Gotham, including the Gotham City souvenir T-shirt that he always liked to wear for sleep.

Shortly after they had returned to the base, the redhead resumed working on the security robot he had been building for the last two months inside the workshop.

The chat he had had with Luke Fox at the manor last night apparently helped provide the solution for the mechanical problem he had been formerly struggling with; by the time the sun began to set, a voice command security robot directly connected to their base’s main computer system and programmed to patrol the perimeter of the warehouse with life detection radar, laser weapon system, and remote alert system that would instantly notified Jason through his Red Hood helmet and Roy through his communicator as well as their personal phone at any detection of intruder was born, in the form of a...cat-sized _lizard?_

“--A gila monster,” Roy informed him, sitting on a swivel stool at the worktable and registering a second administrator ID for Jason in the robot system with his laptop next to the newborn robot on the table, once the bot had finished moving its red eyes up and down on Jason to capture his biosignature with its biometric scan in the workshop. “It’s a symbol for protection, and also reborn and healing, except they’re actually poisonous. I got bitten by one and was in bed for almost a week after Bird--the kid of the chief’s brother--dared me to touch it.”

Jason moved his head in acknowledgement, before he crouched down beside Roy to look at the bot more closely with pleasant wonder. “Why has he got the back spikes and stuff like an iguana if he’s a gila monster?”

Roy gave him a quizzical look. “It’s a ‘he’?”

“It looks like a he, and I just kinda imagine it as your split mini-self, but I dunno.” He asked the robot squatting on its four feet on the table, “What do you think, little guy? Do you feel like a he?”

At the sound of his voice, the bot shifted its grey metal head from Roy to him and beeped in response. “I don’t speak robot, but that sounds like a yes.”

The redhead let out a sniff of amusement; then in answer to Jason’s previous question, he said, “It _was_ supposed to be a gila monster, but they just look a little... _goofy_ , with the big, round head. I thought an iguana might look cooler with the little dragon head and the spikes. And they’re all lizards anyway.”

A hum in reply, then he drew his eyes to Roy, still standing crouched with his forearm propping on the edge of the worktable, a lopsided smile on his face next to Roy’s face. “What are we going to call him? The ‘Roybot’?”

Roy snorted with mild derision, “And let everyone think I’m a dork?” 

“You’re not a dork?” Jason frowned at him, looking confused. “But you’re so adorkable.”

The slight smile on Jason’s face broadened into a grin as he received an expected eye-roll from Roy.

After holding up a straight face for a little, the redhead gave up, a chuckle broke out from his mouth, which was but some slight inches away from Jason’s own mouth.

With only a little stretch of the head, he could catch the smiling mouth with his own. At the same time Jason lowered his eyes and leaned forward, Roy’s eyes drifted down as well, his buzzed red head tilted slightly as it moved closer toward Jason...

A lick of space away from Roy’s lips, Jason halted himself abruptly.

“Hey, now that you’re finished, what say we go out and grab some bites,” he straightened his back and said, while driving back the urge to kiss Roy as he would’ve easily done not so long ago.

It had only been a spur of the moment thing when he had kissed Roy for the first time a year ago back at their old base in Gotham. Just a brief, simple, innocent thing he had felt natural to do at the moment, and he had never really expected it to happen again; then when Roy had kissed him later, it was nice, it was wonderful, it was just kind of hard not to kiss back, so Jason had kissed back, and like sharing a bed, it had quickly become a habit--him or Roy reaching out to bring their lips together, to feel each other, to be close to each other; it hadn’t always been brief and so entirely innocent like the first time, but always it had been easy, nothing so complicated that they would need to discuss about.

Except it had become less and less easy these days, to not grab the smaller body more tightly when the redhead had pasted himself on him in their kissing, to keep his hands from slipping under the fabric of clothes to grope for some warm, bare skin; to not think about how absolutely incredible it might be to feel more of the redhead, to touch him, fully and truly.

It was getting increasingly difficult to not think about...well, **_that_**.

The green eyes stretched from half-closed to open again completely, looking up at Jason with a glint of confusion at first, then soon dimmed down a little as Jason turned to stand further away from Roy at the table.

“...Yeah, sure, let’s go grab some bites,” replied Roy in a reserved voice; the shade of disappointment on his face was painfully visible to Jason’s eyes despite his attempt to mask it with a bland expression, and it was a total pain not to move back to his side, not to just reach out and rub the disappointment off the kid’s face with his fingers and lips.

With the iron will of someone who had been trained by Batman since about twelve, he fixed himself in his position of standing with his hands drooping down by his own sides at an appropriate distance from Roy.

Leaving the bunch of scattered tools on the table, the kid closed up his laptop and stood up from the swivel stool. 

Watching the kid from the side, Jason began again slowly, the thing he and Grayson had just talked about earlier in the manor stealing back in his mind, “While we’re out, maybe we could go get another bed at Costco.”

Roy’s hands stopped short in their way of picking up the newborn Roybot on the worktable.

“You could have your own new bed, in your own room; or you could have the old bed and the old room if you want, I can sleep somewhere else,” continued Jason in a fake easy voice, as the kid went on lifting up the bot in his arms and turned around to him from the table. “It’s not very convenient, isn’t it? That we’ve only got one bedroom with one bed. I mean, what if we’ve got guests that want to stay over?”

“Who’s gonna stay over?” Roy grumbled dubiously in reply, his brows creasing up together into a frown. “We don’t get a lot of guests, and even if we do get some, we’ve got a couch, and some floor mats in the gym, and whoever staying over has got to know we’re not in the B&B business, so it’s not like they’ll mind and give us a bad review.”

“Yeah, but what if we want to, you know, bring someone back.” He hated saying this and he hated sleeping apart from Roy; but he guessed it was high time that he finally tried to do the right thing.

It was a well known fact that his impulse control wasn’t the most excellent. He wasn’t good at not doing stuff, at not trying to get what he wanted; and if he wanted, Roy would probably go to hell with him. The kid had pretty much gone to hell with him before, all because Jason didn’t know any better then. He knew better now.

He and Roy couldn’t keep sleeping in the same bed without something happening eventually. If it weren’t for the frequent working and physical exercise to render his energy at a controllable level, things most certainly would’ve happened already; and he’s afraid that even his works and exercise could only carry him this far.

With no trace of anything in his easy voice that could betray just how much he hated this, he pushed on saying to Roy, “One day when you meet someone, you’re gonna want some private time together--Sure, there’re other places for privacy, but you may want to spend the night with them here, and what happens then if there’s only one bed?” 

The furrow in Roy’s brows deepened as he curtly replied, “You mean what happens when _you_ want to spend the night with someone in here.”

“No, I mean you,” Jason affirmed without a thought; then fixing a solemn stare on Roy’s face, he paused for a beat. “You don’t really spend a lot of time with other people outside of work, don’t you?” he started again reflectively. “It’s always just you and me, we’re almost always together twenty-four seven, and I’m not saying that’s bad, you know I love that. But it doesn’t _have_ to be this way. It’s cool if you want to spend time with other people, or go out and make some new friends of your own. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t make new friends and hang out with them. It doesn’t have to always just be you and me.” 

For a moment Roy just continued to frown at him and say nothing.

“...Yeah, cool, let’s go get another bed,” said the redhead lastly in conclusion, his face turning away from Jason. “I can sleep in the workshop, this room’s pretty much my place anyway.”

It’s the right thing to do, Jason told himself heavily, following some steps behind Roy as the kid moved out of the workshop with the robot in his arms.

Apart from the Red Beauty, which was still in its true super bike mode as they had previously left it, there’s an old unregistered pickup truck in their garage, which they had “rescued” from a chop shop to help with their relocation in LA right before they had moved into the warehouse. 

Having left the robot to guard outside the house, they went to the garage to get the truck for their bed shopping. 

The kid didn’t seem to be upset or reluctant to get a new bed when they were looking for one at Costco before they had their dinner at Olive Garden; but it was clear to Jason that he wasn’t most happy at the moment. He would be happy when he met a nice person at his own age whom he wanted to get close with and knew that he could get close with them without having to worry about Jason.

It was the right thing to do, Jason told himself again, when at last he lay down on his bed alone later in the same night, while Roy was in his own new bed inside the workshop which was now also his own bedroom.

The kid was still a sixteen-year-old _minor_ , and even when Jason had still been crossing all sorts of lines, he had known that that’s a line he shouldn’t cross. He might be a killer, but no way he’s a sleaze. He wasn’t interested in _kids_.

 _But that’s the thing,_ a voice inside Jason came to argue; _like Grayson said, he’s not really a “little kid”, is he?_ _When you look at him, you don’t really see a kid, you see your crime fighter partner who’s perfectly capable and almost as mature as yourself--mature, and loyal, and beautiful, and willing to take in all that of you even your absolute worst. And you know you only kissed him again after the first time because_ ** _he_** _kissed you. He_ ** _wants_** _to kiss you, to touch you. He wants you, you can see that, it’s right on his pretty face. He’ll open his body to you just as he’s opened his heart, and you know he’ll like that--so what if he’s a little younger than you and not an adult like his clone?_

As the voice uttered the words _“he wants you”_ , the look of desire he had seen plenty of times on Roy’s face before shone in his mind and shot a shiver down his spine.

Quickly, he snuffed out the voice--the stuff of his _chʼį́įdii_ , no doubt.

He probably wouldn’t care so much about it if it’s just some other random teenager, but Roy wasn’t some random teenager; and it didn’t matter that the kid wanted him, it would still be wrong.

Pressing his eyes shut, he tried to sleep.

...Only the king-sized bed seemed to be more than just a little empty now that he was all alone on it, and after lying flat on his back for a moment, he shifted around onto his left, which had used to be Roy’s side of the bed, where the kid would be lying on the cybernetic arm when he rolled over to Jason’s side and the arm he put around Jason in his sleep would be the flesh one. 

The redhead didn’t take away his pillow before going to sleep in the workshop earlier. Jason’s hand reached out to pull down the pillow from next to his head.

Holding the thing close against him with an arm as he had done its owner before, he leaned his face into it, to trace the familiar scent, and bury himself inside it.

Then the door of the bedroom opened.

“Oh, uh,” started Roy at the door, a little stunned by the abrupt motion Jason made on the bed when snapping his face up to him from the pillow. “I was just...I just realized I don’t have my pillow.”

Arranging a blank expression on his face, Jason sat up on the bed and nodded his head. “Yeah, of course,” he handed out the pillow to Roy, who drew to the bed slowly to take his own pillow.

For a moment, standing before Jason with the pillow in his hand, Roy stared at him deeply, his green eyes gleaming in the dark of the room as if he was going to say something.

“...’Night,” was what the redhead eventually said, his voice quiet and uncertain.

Also in a quiet, uncertain voice Jason replied, “Goodnight.”

Some brief seconds later, after the kid had returned to his own bedroom to sleep with his own pillow, Jason lay down on his back again on the fairly empty bed.

He felt it was safe to say that doing the right thing really, _really_ sucks _._

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

The “ride” Red Arrow had previously said he would send to pick them up at LA turned out to be a Green Lantern named Hal Jordan--Ollie’s “cuter and funnier brother from another mother”, so as the man introduced himself.

“I guess you can call me ‘Uncle Hal’ if you want,” said the Lantern in a breezy attitude, shortly after Roy had been brought out of the warehouse with Jason by the intruder alert and calmed the bot from shrieking while blasting its laser at the unidentified person in a green jet; “though everyone usually just calls me Hal. Even the little rugrat, after she stopped calling me ‘Space Frog’. Her dad really should teach her to address people properly, or at least be more careful about how he addresses others in front of her. That kid picks up every stupid nicknames he uses, she thinks those are real funny.”

“If it’s alright by you, I’m just gonna call you Hal; or Space Frog, but I’ll remember not to use that in front of the kid,” Roy crisply replied, climbing up into the back of the green jet with Jason.

It was the first time Roy met the man. The Lantern didn’t become bros with Ollie until after he had been kidnapped. He didn’t really know much about the Green Lanterns, but the man seemed cool, and although the jet construct with which the man flew them over swiftly to Star wasn’t quite as sweet as the Batjet, it was still pretty sweet.

Having not had a pleasant encounter with Lanterns before, Jason was somewhat skeptical about the man at first, only by the time the flight was over, a sort of friendship was formed between him and the man over the fact that they both very much enjoyed giving Batman grief.

As the green jet disappeared from the empty ground on which they had landed a few miles away from Red Arrow’s house, the Lantern took the ring off his finger and put it inside the pocket of his brown flyer jacket. 

The older Roy didn’t really say anything about keeping up a normal appearance when he had called to invite Roy and Jason to his new house for his kid’s birthday party on this Saturday afternoon; however, he did mention that some of the neighbors as well as Lian’s friends at elementary school and their parents would be present at the party.

While switching on the masking device in his arm to cover it with an image of skin, Roy musingly said, “I know why it’s important for Ollie and Lian’s dad to keep their identities secret, what I don’t get is how? Shouldn’t everyone know about them already? Who couldn’t recognize that goatee? And I thought Lian’s dad hadn’t been wearing a mask for a while until after he became a big Leaguer.” 

“The world doesn’t think that the only man in Gotham who’s got enough money and power and also free time to be the Bat and the Bat he’s constantly associated himself with can be the same person either,” Jason replied with a shrug. “It’s way too obvious, and people don’t usually like simple, obvious answers, it’s just not romantic enough; or I guess the general public will just really sleep better at night believing that their self-appointed protectors are actually professionals with brains and not just some obvious morons.”

“Well, as a not self-appointed but authorized space cop, I just want to say I’m still not entirely convinced that Bruce Wayne _is_ Batman and not just some rich chump that Spooky’s mind-controlled into being his familiar,” said the Lantern with pleasant irony, before motioning on to Red Arrow’s house with Roy and Jason.

The girl Mia whom Roy had heard about before was the one who came to answer the door. No doubt the girl had heard a thing or two about him as well; a look of confusion passed her face, once she had opened the door of the house and seen Roy with two normal-looking arms.

Noting the girl’s gaze, he deactivated the disguise briefly to show the girl his arm in all of its true metal glory.

“It doesn’t just look shiny, does it?” asked the girl with some controlled curiosity. 

After a quick glance around and finding no civilian in sight, he switched the cybernetic hand into the laser blaster, then into the rocket launcher, smirking a little as a sense of amazement rose shortly on the face of the girl at the door.

“And you said _I_ like to show off,” remarked Jason with a mild snort from beside him.

“If you get to fling your ‘D’ in people’s faces, then I get to show off my big gun,” Roy returned briskly, changing the rocket launcher back into the cybernetic hand.

“I’ve got a magic ring that can make the biggest gun there is if you kids are interested.”

“Keep your ring in your pants or wherever you put it, Hal,” said Mia to the Lantern briefly; then again she moved her eyes to Roy, closing the door behind them after they had all stepped inside, “--As long as you keep your big guns away, I don’t think your arm will be much of a problem. People are likely to just think of it as a normal prosthesis. You don’t really have to hide it, but I’ll still put on some of that holo skin of yours if I were you. There’s a lot of first graders out there and I bet at least half of them will just love to get their sticky little hands on a robot arm.”

Having covered his arm under the image of skin again, he followed Mia through the house with Jason and Hal into the backyard where the party had already begun.

It’s kind of surreal to find a full-on kids party with a buffet table and bouncy house and some other kids party entertainment in his counterpart’s house. He had never had a party like this before, or even been to one. The only times he had ever seen something like this was on TV and movies or when he had passed by other people’s houses in the suburbs. It’s even weirder than the fact that his counterpart had now got his own house that could hold a party like this in a suburb.

“How come I never got a birthday party like this?” he said to Ollie with casual irony, after Mia had brought them to the man and his son Connor and the other man Eddie Flyer who, as Mia told him, was the shady but harmless uncle Connor had sort of adopted, at the buffet table full of kids party refreshment and funny decorations.

“Kids don’t need this sort of thing once they’re _ten_ ,” Ollie plainly replied, “or at all. You know it’s consumer culture like this that’s damned so many of our children and filled the world with all the ungrateful, self-entitled little monsters.” 

“Another pearls of wisdom from Ollie Queen, the parenting gurus,” Jason’s mouth stretched up into a sarcastic smile. “So am I right to assume that you didn’t get any gift for the birthday girl? Since you’re anti giving your children nice things?”

Ollie looked at him coldly. “Of course I got the kid a gift, a nice one too. I still want my granddaughter to love me.” Then turning his face to Roy again, the man made a nonchalant gesture with his hand and continued to explain, “This is a first. We’re only having a party of this scale this year because some other parents from Lian’s class always throw this type of huge birthday party for their kids, and Roy-- _Lian’s dad_ \--just got brainwashed into thinking that he’s got to do the same or he and his daughter will end up being social pariahs in the elementary school circle.”

In a moment, noting the presence of Roy and Jason and Hal, the man of the house disengaged himself from the couple of guests he and Dinah had been chatting with in the front and called his daughter out of the bouncy house. 

Apparently, the birthday girl had insisted on wearing her favorite outfit for her first big party. 

The corner of Roy’s mouth moved up as he saw the little princess running out of the bouncy house in a kid Speedy costume--almost exactly like the actual original one, with the yellow hat included; though her dad had taken the hat off her head before letting her run wild into the bouncy house with her friends earlier.

He didn’t know about the kid’s birthday until the older Roy had called a few days ago, so he had only had time to randomly pick up something that the salesclerk had said the little girls would like at the toy shop with Jason. The kid seemed to be happy with their gifts, anyway.

Watching as the birthday girl ran back to her friends in the bouncy house after gleefully accepting her birthday gifts and leaving them for her dad to put aside with the other gifts, Roy asked the old guy with amused wonder, “Am I really looking at the future Speedy?”

“That’s what she always says she wants to be when she grows up,” the older Roy shrugged. “I used to think it’s damn cute when she says that.”

“And now?”

“Now whenever I think of her joining our ‘family business’ one day, I just comfort myself by thinking that at least it means she’s not going to join her mom in _her_ business,” the guy flashed him a pensive smile. “It’s still damn cute when she wears the costume. I can’t tell her not to wear it anymore, or never to be Speedy or Red Arrow or anything. You can’t keep kids from doing something by yelling ‘no’ to them and putting them down. I can’t stop her from wearing the real thing when she’s old enough to wear it. So I’m just gonna be encouraging and make sure she understands that she can’t be out punching criminals in a costume until she’s at least eighteen, and in the meanwhile, help her to find what other better things she could do in the future and pray by myself everyday that she’ll change her mind and go do something else eventually.”

Roy gave an agreeable nod in response. He didn’t mind if the kid took up his old mantle when she grew up; but for the kid’s own sake as well as her dad’s, it’s definitely best that she wouldn’t.

All the invited guests had arrived at this point, and soon a giant birthday cake was brought out onto the table.

In a few more hours, with the cake all cleaned out and the kids from Lian’s school each received their thank you gift bag, the big afternoon party was coming to an end.

Once every civilian guest had returned home, he and Jason and the gang helped Lian’s dad clean up the great messes from the party, then afterward at sundown all of them went out to Cici’s Pizza, which was where the birthday girl wanted to eat for dinner.

Initially, he and Jason were to return home after the dinner; but while they’re at the restaurant, Ollie just got competitive at hearing that he had flown the Batjet after he had stayed a night at the Wayne Manor with Jason a couple of weeks ago, and decided that he should stay the night at the Queen Mansion as well.

“I don’t understand,” said Connor from Ollie’s side of the table, puzzled at his dad’s apparent antagonism toward Batman. “I thought you and Batman are friends.”

“The ghoul and I are not friends,” Ollie grimly stated, “We’re comrades, we respect each other, but that’s all.”

“You respect each other,” echoed Jason in a wondering tone, sitting by Roy at the opposite side of the table; “Does _he_ know that?”

The man returned with a supposedly withering look at Jason, “ _You_ are welcomed to head back to LA or to your ghoul dad any second. But _my boy_ ’s staying.” His eyes swung back to Roy then, “You want to stay with the Bat punk, fine. You want to work for the old Bat in his Inc thing, fine. But no way I’m going to let you go all Bat without doing anything; if you slept at Batman’s house, then you’ve got to sleep at your own family’s house too.”

“I’m not ‘going Bat’,” Roy regarded the man tartly. “And also, I’m not _your_ boy. I’m my _own_ boy. And I don’t need to take orders from you.”

“That’s why this is _not_ an order,” the man sharply replied, “This is an invitation!”

“Ollie, honey, this is just a suggestion,” started Dinah wisely from her husband’s side, after rubbing her forehead a little; “but it might sound much better if you say it _without_ shouting.”

“I’m not shouting,” the man argued in a not particularly quiet grumble. 

Meanwhile, Roy nodded his head in agreement with Dinah; then having glanced at Jason who shrugged at him nonchalantly in response, he looked back at Ollie and said, “--Ask us again more nicely, then we get ourselves a deal.”

“I hope you only mean ‘us’ as in you’ve decided to go with the ‘they’ pronouns now and not ‘us’ as in you and punkhead,” replied Ollie wryly. The expression on Roy’s face was not amused.

There’s some motion under Ollie’s side of the table which sounded very much like his foot just got kicked by his wife’s. “...Fine,” the man heaved out a sigh, before he asked Roy and Jason to stay the night at the mansion again in a nicer manner.

Once hearing that there’s a sleepover, the princess immediately signed herself and her Daddy up. Hal had got some personal business to get back to, and so didn’t go to the mansion with them but left after dinner.

During the decade when Roy had lain frozen in a cryogenic chamber, the old Queen Mansion had been sold away and not become the house of Ollie Queen again until just some months before he had been brought back to the present.

He had never been back to the place until now; and seeing how long it had been (though to him it wasn’t really that long), he kind of expected that the place would’ve changed beyond his recognition.

The old mansion didn’t look much different than he remembered, as it turned out. Everything still pretty much looked the same on the surface. Roy wasn’t sure if he’s happier this way or not, to see the place remain almost exactly the same while everything had changed so drastically including himself.

It didn’t quite make him feel uncomfortable to be back at the place, anyhow. Just kind of weird, to return to the place that he used to consider home until what was a only a little bit over a year ago in his own perception but was over a decade in reality.

He had never really loved the place, to be honest; it’s smaller than the Wayne Manor, but to him it had still seemed to be way too big with too much space for too much emptiness. But it had been home to him once. “--It’s still your home, it’s always going to be your home,” Ollie had said, when he had come to talk things out with him in LA over half a year ago.

Despite the fact that he had decided to forgive Ollie for what had happened, he had refused the man’s offer for him to move back to Star at the end of their talk then.

It was right not to move back, Roy reckoned once again, as he was now looking about the old family house where he and Jason eventually stayed the night with the gang. 

While it didn’t give him the feeling like he was lost in another dimension as back when he had stayed at Red Arrow’s old place right after he had been brought back from the freezer, or the feeling like a ghost trapped in the life no longer be as many years ago when he had still been seeing the old little house that was his first home in the wood in Arizona from before it had been burnt down in his sleepless dreams, the old mansion just didn’t exactly feel like home to him anymore, not the way the warehouse felt like. 

He could still come back and spend time with the guys in Star, but he had already got his own home in LA--which was probably why being with the gang again wasn’t so much of a pain to him as before; he didn’t have to keep wondering where or what he was supposed to be if not among the gang as he used to, now that he had got his own place and could just be his own person and live his own life with Jason. 

It was nice to hang out with the gang, all in all. He had never really met anyone except Red Arrow and his kid and Dinah until now. Not long after he had made his peace with Ollie, his counterpart had called and said that he and Jason should come meet the whole gang sometimes, and invited the two of them to have dinner with everyone in Star; only he and Jason had been out of the country on a Inc mission then, and by the time they had come back and finally joined the guys for a dinner the next month, Mia had been out on a overnight college visit with her friends while Connor had been off to see his grandpa and his mom with Eddie.

He was glad that he had gotten to know the guys, and he believed that Jason thought so too.

It was obvious that the big guy had made some friends during their visit to Star.

“I like Flyer,” commented Jason, when they’re back at the base the next day. Since their former ride Hal had left the evening before, Red Arrow had asked his JLA buddy to teleport them back to LA. “Man knows how the real world works. Hawke’s way too much of a sappy dreamer, which is probably why he needs guys like Flyer to keep him in touch with reality; but he isn’t like his dad, so he’s cool.”

Roy gave him a mild sniff for his usual Ollie bashing. “Do you think maybe it’s about time that you give the man a break?”

“When he’s no longer an asshole, maybe,” Jason replied nonchalantly, then he turned to some ironic amusement at the thought of something. “--He came to my room last night, you know, to talk to me.”

Roy’s brows furrowed in a bit of bemused surprise. Unlike Jason’s old room at the manor which had been unused for years, his old room at the mansion was currently occupied by Mia. He didn’t sleep in his old room at the mansion last night, nor did he sleep together with Jason (naturally). He had no idea that Ollie had talked to the guy after they had each gone to sleep in the guest rooms. 

“What did he say?” asked Roy, more curious than actually concerned.

“That he and I should try to get along,” Jason told him, “The ‘Black King’ pushed him to do it, I’m sure. We didn’t really talk much. He told me that his wife thinks he should be easier on me because of the ‘tough things’ I’ve been through, but he thinks that events and environment may help shape people, but they don’t program people to be one way or another, and a jerk with excuses to be a jerk is still a jerk and shouldn’t be excluded all liability of being so just because there’re other things responsible.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I agree,” Jason easily replied, taking off his brown jacket and dropping it on the back of their couch. The old leather jacket was a fine thing to wear in Star at this time of the year, but not so much in Southern California; though the guy still wore it here, not all the time, but definitely far too often than he should.

Even Roy sometimes felt his own regular dressing of a T-shirt and a pair of chinos and sneakers could be too much in this city, it was kind of insane that the guy could go around in his leather jacket so often and not look like he was going to evaporate in it. He used to think the thing was bulletproof or there’s some special story behind it, but it turned out, the guy mostly just loved it because he knew he looked good in it. 

It wasn’t quite the hottest day in LA, still the base was little better than a furnace being left alone under the usual heat of their ever sunny city.

While turning on the temperature control system in the base but leaving off the artificial light which was rarely needed at daytime with the base sufficiently lit by the sunshine through the windows, the guy continued to tell him, “Anyway, his majesty the Queen said that he doesn’t want you to stop coming back for a visit because he and I can’t stand each other, so he’ll try to be nicer to me. I told him ‘sure, just don’t pull your old back for that. Roy’s gonna do what Roy wanna do, it doesn’t matter that you and I aren’t fans of each other’.”

In response Roy nodded his head agreeably, not at all worried if Jason wasn’t getting on with Ollie.

The old man didn’t really hate Jason or blame him for anything (except maybe the part that Roy was in the Inc); he’s basically just annoyed because Jason always picked on him, and no way Jason didn’t know that. It seemed clear to Roy that the guy only picked on the old man out of some sense of duty, which was pretty much unnecessary but not entirely unappreciated, and also he just really enjoyed picking on certain people.

If Ollie and Jason never became friends, that’s cool. That’s their choice. There’s no reason for them to force themselves to get along for Roy’s sake. Though it wouldn’t be a surprise to him if they actually grew to like each other one day. Ollie could be a jerk for sure, but he’s a good man, he wasn’t petty or resentful, or any more infuriating than the Bat Lord could be; he would see that Jason was good and like him if Jason just gave him a chance to, which Roy was confident that the guy would, eventually. 

In a moment, having moved into the kitchen with Jason, he started again wonderingly, “What about Mia?”

“Yeah, she’s cool too,” Jason opened the fridge to search them some drinks. “Tough girl. It’s a shock she didn’t get thrown in your old suit.”

“Ollie let her put on her own Speedy suit and work with him and Connor once, it just didn’t work out,” Roy told him, recalling what he had learned from Mia while they had been sparring at the gym in the mansion earlier this morning.

He had gotten out of bed a little earlier than usual this morning. He didn’t really need any more sleep than Jason did, he had just liked to stay in bed for some more moments, to nestle against the warm, solid body back before the guy had started to leave the bed early; then now it just seemed that it was going to be awkward if he didn’t keep up the routine and pretend he was still asleep by the time Jason woke up and went for some morning exercise. 

It didn’t seem necessary to stay any longer in bed in the mansion, where he and Jason had slept in separate rooms (Same as how they were sleeping at home these days. Roy still wasn’t crazy about their new sleeping arrangement, but it’s not like he’s still having any trouble sleeping on his own; and he guessed it was only appropriate that he and Jason should stop sleeping on the same bed. He had always known it wasn’t “normal” for them to sleep together, it had just _felt_ normal).

He had just walked out to see if the big guy was awake in the next room, when he had run into Mia who had presently invited him to spar with her in the gym earlier in the mansion.

No doubt he had outplayed the girl, all by himself with no extra aid of any of his big guns; though not so much as without breaking any sweat.

While he didn’t usually join Jason in his early training, he still trained with the guy at the base a lot. The girl was almost as good as him back in his Speedy days, and would’ve been likely to give him hell at the gym earlier if he hadn’t been improving his skill at hand-to-hand combat and picked up a thing or two from his partner.

The girl had been practicing a lot, as she had told Roy during their sparring, not quite so she could join the business one day, but because she had got to keep herself in excellent shape so she could live the best and longest she could with her condition. Back when she had just been diagnosed as HIV positive, Mia had insisted to become the new Speedy and Ollie had reluctantly agreed; only the first time she had been out on the field, she had experienced a horrible dizziness from her antiretroviral therapy while fighting some gunmen with Connor; a bullet would’ve very easily killed her right on the spot that night, if Connor hadn’t pushed her aside and caught the bullet with his own arm--Afterward, Ollie had convinced her to keep out of the business, to live the life she could very well live for as long as any healthy person could by sticking firm to her treatment, and not to throw away that life of all the possible achievement she could gain for herself in the long run for a moment of glory and get someone else killed in the process. 

“It’s not dying that scares me, it’s the thought that I may die... _sick_ , _useless_ , a sad, no count ex-hooker who’d got absolutely nothing in her life to be proud of except for being luckily saved by a superhero,” Mia had said to him slowly, standing and looking at Roy with a pensive gaze, shortly after they had finished sparring at the gym in the mansion. “I know I shouldn’t be a rooftops crawler like you guys, because that wouldn’t just be me risking my own life but also others’. But part of me has still hoped that one day I can join the club. I mean, I’d just begun my treatment the last time I tried the job, the doc said all the side effects of the meds will fade, and I don’t really get dizzy or nauseous or get any sudden ache in my body or suddenly forget how to move my legs or my arms or anything, not as much as I used to anyway; and I don’t know, with the science these days maybe in a couple of years there’s gonna be a cure for this thing.”

“You can still do the job in a couple of years if you want,” Roy had replied. The girl had stretched her lips into a slight smile.

“Yeah, I know, but what I’m trying to say is...well I know that people can _die_ , in this business, like Ollie, and your Hunk Wonder partner, but I don’t know them before they died; I think I just never really realized how this hero thing could be, until I...met you.” Her eyes had drifted down to his cybernetic arm. “...You’re about the same age as me when I met Ollie. And you’re healthy and you’d got all these training, and it...it still happened.”

His eyes had followed Mia’s into staring down at his right arm. He didn’t think he had truly understood either, the danger of this life, not until he had been back from the cold oblivion.

“...I don’t wanna sound condescending, but I think Ollie’s right, about how you should stay out of this, until after you--I dunno, finish college?--at least,” with his two arms hanging down by his sides, he had looked up at the girl again and said, “This thing we do, everyone always says how it isn’t a game, and it’s true, it isn’t. It feels like it’s all fun and game at the start, or for me at least. And I think sometimes it’s a lot easier, or even important, to just focus on the fun and excitement and not take it all too seriously. But it’s serious. And it’s not just that you can get killed, or lose an arm or a leg, or get someone else seriously hurt or killed when you make a mistake. There’s also these _things_ \--there’s always going to be death in this life, you know; not your own or your friends’, but just death in general. There’s gonna be all kinds of dead bodies you see all the time, the good guys, the bad guys, people you don’t know. It’s horrible and it could make you feel real sick at first, but you don’t know those people so it doesn’t feel like they could hurt for real. But they kind of could? And the monsters, the stuff they did. And I don’t know, most of the time you don’t really feel it, or you don’t realize that you’re feeling it because you’ve just gotten so used to it, or you’ve just learned to kind of ignore it, but I think those could actually hurt too, all these bad, disgusting things you’re gonna see on the job. It could really hurt you and drive you mad, sometimes even to a point that you could actually kill.”

“Then why are you still doing this?” Mia had asked in a quiet voice, her solemn eyes studying his face.

“It’s just who I am,” he had shrugged. “I’m probably a little crazy, and Ollie, and Jason, and Lian’s dad which is also genetically me, we’re all probably a little crazy. But you don’t need to be crazy like us, you can just be... _yourself_. You know Ollie and everyone else will still care about you and feel proud of you even if you aren’t doing this job like us. Plenty of awesome people don’t go out punching criminals in a costume. You can be like that, you don’t need to take up this job because that’s what _we_ do. You can just be an awesome person, doing what _you_ do.”

The solemnity on Mia’s face had eased away gradually, her mouth had curled up. “Well I guess I _can_ still be pretty awesome even if I don’t prowl the streets in a funny costume outside of Halloween.” Roy had returned her smile.

He had never regretted putting on the suit. He didn’t like to think that he had been dragged into this, that it hadn’t really been his own choice to become a crime fighter in the first place because he had been way too young to actually make important life choices for himself when Ollie had first offered him the job. It’s probably true, though; it was unlikely that Ollie would’ve offered him the job if he had had any idea of what he was doing all those years ago. 

Whether or not he would still take up this job if he had known what he knew now, Roy couldn’t say for sure. It _was_ his own choice to stay on this, regardless. He was made for this; he’s nuts enough to love this, nuts enough that even after all the bad stuff that had happened, even with all the bad stuff that he knew for sure was to continue to happen, he still just couldn’t walk away from this. 

He was probably addicted to this, the excitement, the general thrills and wonders, the incredible sense of fulfillment from a successful job. He didn’t believe it was the kind of addiction that would just eat him away and give back nothing in return, however; a lot of real good could come out from this.

A lot of real good could come out from a lot of different things as well. 

Inside the kitchen of their place, he took the family size bottle of orange soda Jason handed to him from in front of their fridge, pouring each of them a drink in their own mug at the kitchen counter while saying, “I don’t think Mia’s going to join the Team Arrow. It’s bad for her health, not just what could happen on the job but the stress. She’ll be in college this year, she said she’s thinking about going to business school after college. Ollie’s got his company back now; he’s gotten better at the business stuff, but he still needs a lot of help. Mia said she’s been learning about the business stuff by herself and she kinda likes it and is pretty good at it. Since she couldn’t join Ollie on the field, she wants to help Ollie in the company. I think she’s gonna become a businesswoman.”

“Smart. She’s probably going to outlive all of us,” Jason replied approvingly.

Roy nodded his head, taking a sip of his drink at the kitchen counter after handing back the yet empty bottle of soda to Jason to put back into the fridge.

A curious look came presently to Roy’s face as he watched the guy move to pick up his own mug on the kitchen counter. “Did you ever think about going to college?”

“Why should I? I’ve learned all I need to know about our kind of business,” replied the guy who should’ve been a college graduate by this point. His blue eyes shifted to look questioningly at Roy after he had taken a sip of his drink. “Did you ever think about going back to high school?”

“No,” the word hadn’t ever made it back to Roy’s mind until now. “I don’t think I want to go back to high school. Never really liked it.”

“Why?” the guy knitted his brows together in a bemused manner. “I thought you aren’t _always_ a nerd. You couldn’t have been bullied at school, could you?”

“I’m still not a nerd,” Roy pointed his own mug at the guy in a dignified gesture. “I just like technology and stuff.”

“So do the nerds.”

“Well at least I never read anything other than technology books and science magazines. You read actual books. That’s even more of a nerd’s thing to do.” 

The guy cast him a smirk while replying easily, “So I sometimes bring a book to read on the beach. It’s good for the brain, Roy. You can’t expect me to just go around with only a good look but no brains.”

Roy worked his mouth shortly, trying not to look amused. “Good look and brains and a plus-size ego with a mouth to match, Mr. Jason Todd, the full party package,” he remarked with mild irony; then afterward he went back on topic, “It’s not that my old high school was bad or anything. Just never really felt blended in.”

Certainly, Jason could relate to that. There’s no place for kids in their world; the ones with superpower might be able to stay kids a little longer, Roy supposed, but not the ones like him and Jason who had to work with their own power and had only their own power to keep themselves safe when no one else could. They might’ve started out young, but once putting on the suit and stepping into this life, whatever left of their kidhood was pretty much in the past.

It was hard not to feel like a pretender or an intruder in a world of normal kids when the world they worked and lived in was completely adult-rated; not that Roy didn’t know anything about the feeling like he’s a pretender or an intruder before this life.

After a casual hum to him in reply, the guy said jokingly, “What about prom? If you don’t get back to school, you’re gonna miss prom, the most magical experience in high school.”

A sniff was carried out from Roy by the over exaggeration of the last of his sentences. Then he regarded Jason with a slight puzzlement. “Does this mean you went to a prom before? I thought you’d only gotten through tenth grade.”

“A junior girl took me as her date, the last fun memory just before I died,” Jason told him, “well, my date’s fun. The rest of the junior/senior prom was a meh.”

“And a meh is supposed to stand for ‘magical’?” retorted Roy with a snort, while wondering to himself how Jason’s date at the prom was. Pretty, for sure. The guy might not have had such a strong, good build at high school as he had got now, but with a face like his, no way he couldn’t get some real pretty date.

Roy felt like he could probably get a pretty date himself at high school too. He’s not bad looking, and he’s most certainly not a nerd. He might be a little bit shorter and skinnier than Lian’s dad at this age, but he’s not any worse than the old guy, and from what he had heard it was almost certain that the old guy had dated some pretty people in high school. 

The old guy had probably had “done it” with at least one pretty person before he had finished high school, Roy thought to himself wryly, with a little stir of envy.

Next to him at the kitchen counter, Jason was saying, “So prom isn’t exactly a magical experience for me, but it can still be pretty cool. Dancing with a beautiful girl to a romantic song, that’s nice.”

“Or a guy.”

A kind of blank astonishment abruptly seized Jason. “What?”

“Or a guy,” Roy crisply repeated, not understanding why the guy was acting like he had just said something shocking and disturbing. “If I go to a prom, I could be going with a guy.”

With his brows scrunching together, the guy stared at him for some more seconds, before he started again hesitantly in a strange voice, “Yeah. Right. I just, well you know how Harper’s got a reputation with the ladies, so I just thought you...like girls.” 

“I’m pretty sure I do, girls’ nice. But I like guys too.” His eyes fixed on Jason, “I mean, I kissed a guy.”

A flash of something crossed the blue eyes as they came into contact with Roy’s gaze. “Yeah, no, I just,” the guy muttered in reply, then as if not knowing what else to say, he fell into standing silently beside Roy at the kitchen counter, his eyes shifted down to the cup of orange soda in his hand and stared at it intently.

It wasn’t usual for Jason to get silent like this. He had always been pretty loud with his thoughts and had got a lot of things to say to Roy pretty much the entire time they knew each other.

Not liking the unusual silence, Roy began again shortly, “Well I don’t think prom’s my thing anyway.”

It seemed to bring Jason immediately to relief. Jumping right back into his usual attitude, the guy took a sip of his orange soda and happily replied, “No?” his mouth stretched up into a teasing smirk, “It’s because you can’t dance, is it?” 

“I can dance,” Roy quickly defended himself.

A scowl rose onto his face as Jason sniffed at him in a doubtful manner. 

To prove his words all good and true, he put down his own cup of drink his cybernetic hand had been holding, snatched Jason’s mug out of his hand and put it aside with his own mug on the kitchen counter.

As his cybernetic hand reached out to place Jason’s left hand on its shoulder, his left hand clasped up Jason’s right hand; then moving down the cybernetic arm to put its hand on the guy’s back, he began to draw himself and Jason to step in a slow, easy repetition of left, right, left, which the guy readily followed with impeccable coordination.

“See, totally can dance,” Roy cast a smug look at the guy as they were moving slowly but smoothly together on the kitchen floor, feeling a grin crawl onto his face at the incredibly nice and warm sound of Jason’s laughter.

“Not bad,” the guy rejoined, after bringing down his laughter into a chuckle. “But hadn’t you ever got a British gentleman butler to tell you that you can’t really dance with a lady without asking for her permission first?”

“Please do pardon me, my big lady, I’ll so remember to get your corsage and make a bow and offer you my hand while I ask you to grant me a dance in advance the next time,” mocked Roy with brisk sarcasm.

“What a lucky little arse you are that this lady’s perfectly proud of her own awesome figure and hasn’t got any problem with being called ‘big’ right in front of her face,” Jason returned with a solemn expression, only his blue eyes were still glinting with smiles, and as Roy grinned back they softened in a most beautiful and most familiar way, speaking sweetly to him in their blueness of a kiss coming.

In the shine of sunlight inside their kitchen, the synchronized pace of his feet and Jason’s gradually slowed on the floor, their clasped hands lowered down to their sides as the easy, steady swaying of their bodies fell almost completely still.

Toward him Jason’s head leaned itself down; a spark of warmth lit inside Roy as the hand on his shoulder slid onto the side of his neck to guide his face up at the same time, his skin tingled with anticipation. 

...Except all of a sudden the guy changed course; or maybe he had just read it all wrong, like an idiot, _again_. 

The lips he was so certain were about to rest themselves on his own lips got pulled up to brush across the top of his buzzed head eventually. Then before Roy could even react, those lips were gone.

With his left hand falling back on Roy’s right shoulder, Jason straightened his back again. 

The clasp on Roy’s left hand at the sides of their bodies loosened as the guy was starting to pull away from their dancing position; once he had noted that, his cybernetic hand tightened its hold on the guy’s back promptly.

\-- _Quit embarrassing yourself, Harper,_ Roy grumbled gruffly to himself, while getting his cybernetic arm to drop down to his own side and letting go of Jason’s hand before the guy could let go.

It was time he accepted the truth. He had still had some doubts about that when he had heard Jason talking to Dick inside the gym at the manor a couple of weeks ago; the guy didn’t like to lie but he didn’t always tell the truth either. But there’s no denying that now, the guy just didn’t think of him like this. If his own new bed in his own new bedroom hadn’t made it clear to Roy, this certainly did. 

Sure the guy might have enjoyed sharing a bed with him and occasionally making out with him, but that’s all; and now he had decided it should stop, all their little make out sessions and the sleeping together--to spare Roy from making a fool of himself by stupidly expecting anything more, obviously. 

Thinking about what the guy had said to try to get him out of his bed a couple of weeks ago, Roy began slowly in a plain voice, “While I’m not too interested in prom, I guess there’s at least one good thing I can get from going back to school. I can get to meet more people.”

Jason stood looking at him in a somewhat preoccupied manner. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he turned around to pick up the cup of orange soda he had left on the kitchen counter. “I’m still not going back to school. It probably won’t clash too much with our work here, but it’s gonna be impossible to keep an okay attendance in school while still be available for every Inc missions, and like you said, we’ve already known what we’ve got to know about our line of business, I don’t have anything more to learn in high school or even college, and there’s always the internet and short courses if we want to learn anything more. So I guess maybe I’ll just, I dunno, sign up on an _app_ or something.”

“An app?” Jason frowned at him in bewilderment. “For what?”

“Meeting people?” Roy shrugged, taking a sip of his drink before he shifted his eyes to the big guy. “...You do think I should do that, right? With the whole ‘meeting people and bringing them back here’ thing you said before?”

Jason moved his head slowly. “...Right,” he uttered, trying to lose the frown on his face, though not with a lot of success. “That’s… _right_. I did say that.”

With a curt nod to Jason in response, Roy moved around to the sink, drinking up the remains of soda from his Speedy Gonzales mug which Jason had thought it funny to buy him, and washed his mug clean and stepped out of the kitchen in a brief moment.

It’s settled then. He couldn’t imagine how the guy would bring any random person back to their place, but now with him out of the way, there’s no doubt that Jason would be out dating some pretty people soon.

It was cool if he and Jason weren’t a thing like _Dinah_ apparently thought they were--“She doesn’t tell Ollie about this, because he still thinks it’s Jason’s fault that now you’re kind of a Bat boy and she’s afraid he’s gonna flip if he knows,” Mia had told him as they had stepped out of the gym to get some breakfast earlier in the mansion.

“Joining the Inc doesn’t make me a Bat,” Roy had grunted in reply. “And it isn’t Jason’s fault that we’re in the Inc. Batman invited us and I don’t think it’s a bad idea. It’s a big organization with awesome resources. Things at home aren’t always so exciting, especially now that we’ve got a gang leader on our side to help us keep the other goons in check. The Inc brings us all the big jobs we want outside of LA.”

Mia had nodded at him in acknowledgement. “That didn’t really answer my question about whether or not Dinah’s right on you two being a thing, you know.”

“We’re not ‘a thing’,” Roy had answered flatly, “We’re partners.”

So he and Jason weren’t sleeping on the same bed or kissing each other like they used to, so the guy wasn’t and might never be interested in him that way. They’re still going to be partners, they’re still best friends, though neither of them had ever said that.

If Jason was to get a boyfriend or a girlfriend someday, that’s absolutely perfectly _fine_. He’s not going to humiliate himself by getting all jealous and moping around like some lost puppy. 

He was going to get a boyfriend or a girlfriend too, in fact, or just some casual dates at least; and like _hell_ he wasn’t going to get the freaking hot action he should so be getting like possibly everyone else at his age soon.

It didn’t have to be just him and Jason, the guy had said so himself. So Jason didn’t want to sleep with him, big whoop; Roy could bet his cybernetic arm that someone else would.

  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

Quickly following the encounter with Artemis and Bizarro in the midst of the trouble with a new metahuman crime boss who had been attempting to take over Los Angeles by force with the stolen Super-manbaby that Artemis had been hired by his evil bald dad to retrieve, they had a meeting with Luthor, the bald devil himself.

Dealing with Luthor was annoying enough in itself without it happening right before the very day Roy had been all but aching for and he had got great things in plan that most definitely did _not_ involve Luhtor and his stupid bald head.

Or a trip to Qurac--which was what Luthor eventually talked him and Jason into and they didn’t return from until almost a week after the big day.

It couldn’t be out of altruism that the bald guy asked for his and Jason’s help to get an evil warlord out of Qurac with Artemis and Bizarro. Roy wasn’t entirely clear about what personal interest Luthor had secretly got in this; but the folks in Qurac needed their help, and as much as he hated the idea of working for Luthor, out of all people, at the time he had been most expecting not to be at work, he and Jason had little choices but to agree to fly over to the Middle East country, where they nearly died in a collapsed prison while working alongside their new friends to overthrow the said evil warlord and eventually prevented the entire nation from being destroyed by some evil magic working behind the warlord who turned out to be as stupid as he was evil.

Finally, after another unpleasant meeting with Luthor back in the States about the finished mission, they parted ways with the big lug and big Amazon lady in Metropolis and started on their way home.

By no means their warehouse was gorgeous, with its grey metallic outlook and the not so flattering solar panel arrays covering its rooftop; but the way it stood peacefully under the warm evening light of their shining City of Angels with the bot crawling about in its front was nothing less than beautiful to Roy after the death and suffering of many in Qurac and the almost annihilation of the entire nation he and Jason had just witnessed during the week.

Once they had entered its detection radius, the bot moved to him and Jason from the side of the house. Roy didn’t think it was possible for the bot to feel anything, but the brisk, delightful “beep, beep” it gave him and Jason in greeting sounded almost like it was happy they’re back.

The big guy was happy to be home too, if the smile on his face as he stooped down to pet the bot in its head was any indication.

Having given the bot a pet in its head as well, Roy stepped inside the base with his partner, dropped himself next to the guy on the couch after they had left their luggage on the floor, and did nothing for a moment except sitting sprawled with the guy and letting the bliss of being home again slowly soothe away their strain from the properly exhausting week.

With his eyes closed and his head lolling on the backrest, he had almost dozed off on the couch when he heard Jason saying, “We should probably check up with Suz to see if there’s any problem while we’re gone.”

“Later,” he answered briefly, his sleepiness dissolved on the instant as the fact that it had been days since his **_seventeenth birthday_ ** swooped back into his mind. “Now we’ve got a more important thing to do.”

“What, you wanna do that now?” Jason regarded him with assumed surprise, which Roy knew was assumed because there’s no confusion in the way Jason’s arms looped themselves around him once he had shifted up from Jason’s side to sit straddling the guy on their couch. “We’ve just gotten back from the Middle East. We almost died there, Roy, don’t you wanna get some rest first?”

“We could rest forever when we’re dead,” Roy plainly replied, “We’re not dead yet.”

“Oh, right,” Jason snickered, “Amen to whoever big shot up there that had heard your prayer of not wanting to die a _virgin_.”

Roy scowled at him. “Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not mocking you,” the guy bit back another snicker, struggling to put on a grave face as he said, “I just wish I’d thought of that before, then I might not have to die the first time.”

In response Roy let out a mild snort. 

He had always known that they weren’t going to die then, it was only Jason who had felt that it might be the end while they had been trapped in a collapsed prison in Qurac. “--I suppose I should tell you that I wish you weren’t here,” the guy had said to him solemnly, his shoulder had almost gotten crushed from shielding Roy against a falling wall just some seconds ago; “but I don’t wanna lie. If I’ve got to die in this godforsaken country again, I’m glad that I can at least die with you by my side.” 

“Don’t get all sappy on me right now, you big goof, we’re not gonna die,” Roy had answered firmly, “Not here, not today. You’d already died once only a couple of years ago, Jay, it’s gonna be stupid for you to check out again so soon; and if there’s a god up there and there’s any good in him or her or whatever, then I’ll definitely not die a virgin!”

Since any further disturbance would only bring more rocks down on their heads, he couldn’t blast their way out with the cybernetic arm; all he could do then was to hold a streak of laser through the slight crack between the debris above. Eventually, Bizarro had discovered them through the laser and dug them out of the wreckage. 

The near death experience in Qurac didn’t shake Roy any more than the many other near death experiences he had been through since about eleven. He was long since used to the almost dying. He would’ve had to take an early retirement, maybe even in a mental hospital, if he didn’t get used to that, if he hadn’t learned to not drive himself insane by dwelling too much on the thoughts of how he might’ve died at one point or another.

The Diné had never cared much about dying, it was living that mattered to them. He might not be a real Diné or believe everything he had picked up from the tribe, but the living part he believed.

He didn’t want to spend his life wallowing and writhing in the thought of death; and despite how often the guy brought up his own death, he was certain that Jason wouldn’t want to either.

It seemed doubtful to him that Jason would’ve been touched much deeper by their recent experience in Qurac. However, the guy had indeed died in that country once. He looked at the guy more closely. 

“Are you…?”

“I’m good,” Jason answered with clear honesty, “Qurac is shit but I’m good, really. I’m alive. And you. We’re both alive.”

Roy nodded his head briefly in acknowledgment. “We could still talk about Qurac or whatever else you wanna talk about if you want.”

“Are you sure ‘talking’ is what you wanna do instead of resting?” asked Jason with an amused twist of his lips, his eyes glancing significantly at Roy who was still sitting astride him on their couch.

“It isn’t. I just don’t want to be inconsiderate. I don’t wanna _talk_ , we could talk later. I’ve been seventeen for days and we agreed that when I’m _seventeen_ \--”

His voice went silent for a moment as a pair of lips seized his mouth.

The voice of Jason lowered into a whisper as he said, his lips lingering on Roy’s and smiling, “Happy seventeen.” Then he went on to fulfill his part of the agreement he had made with Roy some months ago. 

***

Instead of driving away, he stopped the bike again right around the corner from the indie rock club at which he had just dropped the kid off to wait alone for his date.

Roy didn’t seem to think it was necessary to tell him anything about this date he was going to meet this evening, apart from the fact that it’s from some ridiculous dating app he had apparently been using for the last few days.

It wasn’t even until earlier this afternoon during their shopping for the new clothes that Roy had suddenly wanted to get from the store had he informed Jason he was going out on a date tonight.

“Do you really need to buy new clothes for a date? Your old clothes are fine, you love your old clothes, why couldn’t you just wear them,” had said Jason glumly earlier at the clothes store, lapsing into a bit of vexation once he had found out the reason why the redhead would’ve thought of getting some new clothes for himself all of a sudden.

“Well my clothes aren’t exactly nice, are they,” had replied Roy’s voice from inside the fitting room, where he had been trying on the casual denim shirt he and Jason had both agreed was good.

“They look nice to me.”

“Aren’t you the one who always says I should get more clothes?” the kid had retorted, a little bemused at his sudden loss of enthusiasm. “And you know I probably would just borrow some of your nice clothes if you’ve got anything my size.” He had stepped out of the fitting room then. “How do I look?” 

The casual denim shirt Roy had put on somehow didn’t seem quite so nice to Jason as a moment ago before he had learned what it was actually for. “Dorkish,” he had answered in a grumble.

“Really?” With a skeptical frown on his face, the kid had turned around to check himself again on the fitting room mirror. 

For an instant, he had felt much inclined to tell Roy that he looked awful in that shirt and that he shouldn’t act like an idiot and waste his (their) bucks on any nice new clothes for some random (possibly lousy) date from the internet that he might not even see for the second time. “...Nah, just kidding, you look great,” he had grunted dryly, not wanting to be an asshole. 

Honestly, he thought this dating app thing was a dumb idea. 

When he had told Roy that maybe he should make some new friends and spend time with them earlier, this was not what he had had in mind. He couldn’t tell Roy how awfully stupid he found this, or get all snoopy and ask him more about his date tonight, and act like he somehow wasn’t altogether as cool as he had initially shown about Roy going out with someone.

It’s all cool to him if the kid was going out with someone (...preferably a girl; he didn’t quite like the idea of the redhead being with _another_ guy if he was to be totally honest), as long as they’re good and not some jerk or some dangerous psychopath.

Before tonight Roy himself had never even met his date in person, all he had known about them was from their dating app profile and his online chat with them. His date might not be anything he had expected. It could just be a dangerous psychopath or some adult creep disguising themselves as a sweet, harmless teenager. Sure the redhead could handle himself; but Jason felt like it was only necessary for him to stick around, just in case that this turned out to be a trap of some kind.

In a moment, when Roy’s date showed up to meet him outside the indie rock club, Jason couldn’t be more glad that he stuck close. 

His face darkened at the sight of the black-haired, six-foot tall _adult creep_ whom, to his immense irritation, his underage partner didn’t even look the least surprised or disappointed to meet but appeared to be actually expecting.

Clearly not finding anything unappealing about the kid and the new smart and adorable denim shirt he was wearing, the creep greeted Roy with palpable delight. Almost as if he was delighted as well, the kid returned the creep’s greeting with a quick smile.

Silently, Jason stepped up from his hiding spot behind the corner on the street, following his partner and the creep right after the two of them had moved inside the indie rock club for a live concert of some local bands--the creep’s idea, no doubt; _Harper_ might’ve been in some kind of a band once, but Roy wasn’t so much as a music lover but a tech monkey and would hardly be interested by music or the local music scene.

Given that the redhead would certainly not be happy to find that he was--not “spying”-- _watching over_ him, he decided to wait until the creep was alone before he gave him a most unforgettable lesson about trying to take advantage of a sixteen-year-old.

Having found himself an empty table in an unnoticeable corner, he sat keeping a close eye on Roy and the creep as they were listening to the band while chatting to each other pleasantly at the bar. 

With the long sleeves of his new denim shirt rolled up to his elbows, the kid was sitting at the creep’s right, his left hand next to the creep’s right hand on the bar table.

There’s nothing pleasant about the way the creep’s hand fitfully touched the kid’s in a casual manner on the bar table during their chatting, though Roy himself didn’t seem to mind. Jason stared grimly at their touched hands from his spot at a distance, believing for sure that the creep wouldn’t be able to get any further than that, not with him here and watching.

...Only some moments later, just as the band on the front stage had finished their last performance of the evening, he lost sight of the creep and his partner.

While he was sitting alone at the table, a young guy came up to him with a smile. “Hey,” began the guy, handsome and well-dressed, and totally blocking his view. 

“ _What,_ ” snarled Jason in impatience, before he realized that the guy was only just trying to hit on him.

In different circumstances where he was less occupied and didn’t wish so much for the guy to get out of his face, he would’ve found it flattering and might’ve even enjoyed the attention. 

Having told the guy to move away with the most politeness he could muster in his extreme impatience, he switched his eyes back to where Roy and the creep had been sitting.

The little Red was gone with the creep.

Right away he left the club, and in a second or so as he found the two of them again right ahead of him on the street, the creep was **_kissing_ ** his sixteen-year-old partner.

Evidently, the kid had even _less_ self-preservation than Jason had thought, judging by the seeming enjoyment in which he received the creep’s kiss with his eyes closed, his disguised right arm that he should very well be using to put some serious pains in the creep drooped relaxed by his side while the hand of his flesh arm was perching on the creep’s neck.

“Wha--?” Roy snapped open his eyes in confusion, his left hand falling down from the creep’s neck as the creep was dragged abruptly away from him. “...Jason? What are you doing here?”

“Saving you from a creep, what does it look like,” Jason coldly replied, holding the creep fast with a strong grip on his nape.

His fist was beyond ready to kiss the _shit_ out of the creep, when the creep spluttered to explain to him that he wasn’t really so much of the type of creep Jason had assumed he was, but more like an _idiot_ who would believe a teenager when he told him he was “over eighteen”.

Some mixed disdain and incredulity came into Jason’s grim eyes.

“Are you fucking serious?” 

“No, honestly, I had no idea!” squeaked the maybe not creep but more likely idiot, yet out of Jason’s grip at the moment and quite nervous about that; “...Well I mean, yeah I thought he looked a bit young at first, but he said he’s just a late bloomer!”

Jason kind of hoped that the guy was lying, so he could have the pleasure of messing him up for being a creep. However, there’s no trace of lies he could read on the guy’s nervous face. 

After a quick debate with himself on whether or not it was still all right for him to mess up this guy even if he was only an idiot, he dropped his hand reluctantly from the guy.

“Beat it.” 

At his curt order the guy stumbled to leave, but was brought to a stop by Roy’s voice croaking at him promptly in exasperation, “Don’t listen to _this_ guy.”

While speaking to the pausing guy on the street, the redhead stabbed Jason’s face with a vicious glare, “He’s just being _ridiculous_. Everything’s cool, Eric. You’ve got nothing to worry about, definitely not this big boob--he’s _leaving_ , trust me.”

“He’s not leaving,” spoke Jason flatly and most surely, turning his face from Roy to the guy again, and cast the guy a wry look while adding, “You see, Eric? This lying kid lied to you about his age and now he’s lying to you again. You trust him on this again he could get you killed.”

The vicious glare on Jason’s face changed into an even more vicious glower.

The nervous eyes of the guy Eric flickered briefly between Jason and Roy in indecision and perplexity.

It appeared that the guy wasn’t such an idiot after all. “I’m sorry, Roy,” said Eric to the kid at last, “You’re cute and all, and maybe we could go out again some other times--” Jason pinned his eyes on him. “I mean _in a couple of years_ , not like...Only when your brother thinks it’s absolutely cool, that’s what I meant.”

“He’s not my brother,” Roy informed the guy grimly with a scowl.

At the same time Jason was saying, “I’m his partner.”

Surprised and unsure of what to make of that, Eric frowned at the two of them in a questioning manner. However, he was quite sure that he wanted very much to get out of here, so instead of asking them any question, he just went on saying, “Yeah, I’mma just, I just really don’t wanna get into any trouble, sorry.”

Before even finishing his words, the guy set off to leave the street at a quick pace, which certainly didn’t help mollify Roy’s temper. 

Snapping his face from his leaving date to Jason again, he began to growl at Jason in unleashed fury, “I can’t _believe_ you just sabotaged me like that!”

“Sabotaged you?” Jason snorted at him, his voice cold with an edge of irritation. “Try ‘protected you’, Roy, from yourself, apparently--What the hell did you think you’re doing with that guy?”

“I was on a date and I don’t need your protection on a date. Everything was going so well before _you_ showed up.”

“What do you suppose was going to happen if I _didn’t_ show up?”

“The sickest of horrors that not even the grade A sickos in Arkham have the stomach for,” answered Roy flatly with grim sarcasm. “Sex with a nice, attractive person, what did you think, dumbass.”

This little idiot had actually thought he was going to hook up with that guy, unbelievable. “You lied to go on a date with a grown-up man and I’m the dumbass?” 

“Alright, fine, so I lied, but I wasn’t going to get the guy into any trouble,” Roy’s voice faltered a little, in a sense of shame not nearly so strong that he couldn’t at once restore a stern poise and went on saying, “And so what if I go out with someone older, how’s that hurting anyone?”

“That guy isn’t just a year or two older than you--he’s a _grownup_. He’s almost as old as _Grayson_.”

“No way, his profile said he’s twenty-three and he doesn’t look any older than that,” replied Roy shortly with very little care. “And so what if he’s a grownup. I’ll be a grownup too in a couple of years. In fact, I _am_ a grownup, I was born before you, big guy. I’m actually older than both you and Lian’s dad. I’m practically the dad of a seven-year-old’s dad. I’m a freaking granddaddy!”

“Well you’re not acting very grown-up right now, aren’t you, ‘granddaddy’?” Jason snapped back abruptly in a hissing tone. “Harper can go fuck someone’s grandpa or grandma for all I care, but you’re not him; you’re you and you are _not_ messing around with an adult.”

Roy’s face took on a mock questioning expression. “Is that an order, boss?”

“Don’t call me that,” Jason glared at him. “You know damn well I’m not your boss.”

“Then _don’t_ act like you are and tell me who I can or cannot spend my time with,” the redhead strode up with a currently disguised cybernetic finger pushed toward Jason in an angry gesture. “Whoever I want to be with is my own business. You want me to go spend more time with other people so you can be free to spend _your_ time with someone else without me holding you back, I get it, and you’ve got what you want, Jason--now how about you just let me do what _I_ want.”

“That’s _not_ the reason why I said you should spend more of your time with other people,” Jason leaned down to stare into his face with an intense glare while saying through gritted teeth, “And I only meant other people like someone your own age, not an older guy!”

“But what if I don’t want anyone my age, what if I want an older guy,” retorted Roy with his head stretching closer to Jason in a challenging manner.

“You don’t want an older guy,” Jason’s voice sank into a deep, forbidding rumble.

“Yeah, right, because you always know exactly what I want, what is good for me.”

“I may not know everything, but I probably still know more about what’s good for you than you, Roy,” Jason sneered at him. “If you have any idea what’s good for yourself, you’ll just be more honest with how you feel and let people know you’re upset when you’re upset about things, but you never really do that, do you? Just like you never do tell people what you actually want without someone else making you.”

“You wanna know what I actually want, is that it, Jay?” Roy hissed with his eyes blazing, “-- _This_ is what I want,” his cybernetic arm shot up at Jason, who was at once yanked forward by a strong grip on the front of his clothes.

The angry mouth crashing up against Jason’s own broke loose in him that stirring, agonizing something his conversation with Roy had slipped behind his irritation.

On the instant both of Jason’s arms flew up, catching the redhead fast with one of them around his back, the hand of the other one holding his buzzed head from the side and brushing its thumb about his cheek as the lips of Roy and the lips of Jason’s own moved to chase each other.

The knowledge that he shouldn’t give himself up to this since it would only make doing the right thing significantly harder fell away from Jason’s mind along with his irritation, and it didn’t begin to return until about a minute later a pair of guys who appeared to be a gay couple passed by and one of them jokingly said, “--Good golly, I know we’re all free and proud in LA, but there’re children on the streets, get a room, hot-lips.”

The redhead didn’t seem to hear that, or care about that. Jason didn’t care about that either. It didn’t bother him that they were on the street, or that they had been fighting just a moment ago, though why or what exactly they had been fighting about had become a bit fuzzy to him; still, they needed to talk, to figure out what’s what, he supposed.

His right arm slid off from Roy’s back; his left hand lingered a second or two more on the warm face, angrily flushed at the start but now delightfully flushed, before it dropped back again to Jason’s own side.

“I...” he began dumbly, not quite sure what’s what, which kind of frustrated him a little; he didn’t like feeling uncertain about things. 

The kid was looking up at him with his brows knitted together in a similar uncertainty, his green eyes gleaming into Jason’s as if eager for him to say more.

Seeing Jason fail to come up with more words to say, the face of Roy grew set again and his eyes shifted away abruptly.

Without uttering a single word himself, he turned around from Jason, crossed his arms over his chest and began to walk.

“Wha--” Jason stared dumbfounded behind him, “Where the hell are you going?”

“Not to get laid, you happy?” Roy grunted back tersely, keeping his back to Jason while continuing to walk down the street on his own. “I’m going for a walk. Don’t follow me, just go home.”

Jason glared at him, so annoyed that the little idiot would just walk off like this that he almost felt like he could really leave him be and go home by himself.

A couple of moments later, having walked nearly two streets with Jason tailing some steps behind him in silence, the redhead eventually stopped to scowl at Jason over his shoulder.

“What are you doing? I told you to go home.”

“Why should I listen to you,” Jason mildly retorted, “You’re not _my_ granddaddy.”

A hint of amusement was discovered on Roy’s face despite his attempt to look unimpressed.

The corner of Jason’s mouth drew up into a faint smile. Noting a fast food shop nearby on the street, he tossed a glance toward the place and said, “Come on, let’s go sit down. I’ll buy us some shakes.”

For some seconds Roy did nothing but just stand staring at him in the front; then finally he gave a faint nod of his head.

Inside the fast food shop, with two large cups of strawberry milkshake Jason had bought them, they went to sit down face to face together at a booth table in a quiet corner. 

Though the expression on Roy’s face had moderated, the way he was sitting deep in his seat before Jason, his flesh arm drawn across his chest and its hand tucked under his cybernetic arm which was holding his cup of milkshake up to him with its disguised hand indicated strongly that he still wasn’t in his best mood at the moment.

After an absent sip from his own cup of milkshake and putting the cup down with his both hands dropped by its sides on the table, Jason began slowly and thoughtfully, “We can’t have sex, you and I, not until you’re old enough.”

“I’m old enough to punch criminals,” replied Roy with bland indifference, his eyes not meeting Jason’s but staring dully about the shop. “If you’re not interested, you could just say so, you know.”

“That’s not why I said we can’t have sex, and I didn’t say maybe you should go see other people because I wanted to spend less time with you. I only told you that because...well it just seemed to be the right thing to say at the moment. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’ve got to stick with me or anything. It’s cool if you want to see someone else, not an _adult_ , but someone close to your age.”

“What exactly is the problem about me sleeping with an adult anyway?”

“Well it’s _illegal_ , for starters.”

Roy cast him a skeptical glance. “Most of the stuff we do at work is illegal, and what do you of all people care about abiding by the law?”

“This’s just different,” Jason grumbled dismissively while reaching down to take another sip of his milkshake.

“Different how? Different like consensual sex with an older person is going to...what? Muck me up worse than getting amputated and stuck in a freezer for over a decade? Than dealing with all kinds of murderous psychos and the countless other crap and craziness from our job?”

“But that’s the thing, don’t you see?” said Jason more earnestly with a shake of his head. “We chose to risk our life for this shit job ourselves, but it also wasn’t really our choice when a couple of stupid jerks got us into this at the beginning. We’ve both given our blood for a life we would easily not have lived if someone else didn’t make a dumb decision. And it should have been _our_ decision. It should’ve been ours to choose, who we are, how we live, not _them_. Our life shouldn’t have been defined by them and _their_ choices and _their_ decisions. And I...despite all that, I’ve made some dumb decisions too, about you.”

While he was speaking, the kid shifted slowly to sit closer with his own cup of milkshake laid down and his two hands lowered at the sides of the cup on the table like Jason. 

“Are you talking about the killing thing? ‘Cause we’ve already gone over that,” asked Roy in reply, brows furrowing slightly in mild bemusement.

“It’s not about that,” Jason told him, “well, maybe it’s a little bit about that, but the most important point is, you had absolutely no reason to get involved with me if I didn’t try to recruit you the night we met. And now here we are, and I’m not...I don’t wanna torture myself, thinking over and over about how I should’ve left you alone so you wouldn’t have to end up being my partner and go through the shit you’ve gone through because of me; I mean, what’s the point? What’s that going to achieve? It’s all done, neither of us could change what already happened, and I...I don’t actually know, if I really want to change what happened the night we met in Gotham and not get myself involved with you in the first place.”

The green eyes were staring at him deeply. “I don’t hate getting involved with you, in case you’re wondering.”

“I don’t hate getting involved with you too,” Jason moved his mouth into a smile. “But the thing is, almost right after you’re back from the pod, you’ve gotten involved with me. You’re almost always with me since you’re back from the pod. And I don’t...There’s so little we’d actually got to choose. How we’re born, who our parents are, how we’re raised. A lot of things in our life used to always seem to be beyond our own choosing; there’s a time we had no choice but to live by someone else’s rule, someone else’s decisions, someone else’s power, and I can’t tell you how much that sucks. We’ve got the right to choose for ourselves but somehow we don’t always get to choose, and I hate that. I fucking hate that when other people get to choose for us, and I don’t want you to feel like you’ve got no choice either. You being my partner was your decision, I have no doubt about that; and we can be partners without being _that_ other kind of partners. I just want you to understand that you’ve got options. I don’t want you to feel like you’ve got to be this way with me because we’ve been together this whole time and that’s your _only_ choice.”

“But what if it’s the only choice I’d like to make,” uttered Roy quietly, his eyes dropping down to gaze at Jason’s hands near his own pair of hands on the table.

He shifted his hands on the table slightly. Both sets of the curled fingers of Roy’s flesh hand and his cybernetic hand moved from around his own cup of milkshake to lay themselves in the stretching hands of Jason, after he had brushed their backs gently with his knuckles.

“That would be wonderful,” he said softly to Roy in reply. “But there’s already so many wrong things in our life, Roy, and maybe adding one more really doesn’t matter, but I don’t want to do us wrong. If we’re really going to do this, I want it to be right--I _need_ it to be right. I’m not...good, at doing the ‘right thing’, as you know. Most of the time the right thing just doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t _feel_ like doing the right thing a lot--Honestly, I don’t even think I feel a lot of things a lot, especially after the death. The strongest I remember feeling most of the time is just pissed off, just mad as hell, I don’t know if it’s because of the death or the way I came back or the way I was raised, or if it’s just the way I am. But I don’t feel so mad, while I’m with you. You told me before you feel like you could be yourself with me, I feel like I could be myself with you too, and more, somehow. And I want myself to continue to be with you, to be _us_. There’s a good chance that somewhere on the road I’ll still end up doing stuff that is wrong to someone else, but I wanna at least be able to do right by you--for you, for myself, for us.”

“So what do we do now,” asked Roy, with a tender stare on Jason.

“Nothing? Until you’re... _seventeen_ , I guess?” He gave a light squeeze on both of Roy’s hands, one warm with supple skin and one cold and fully steely under the electronic simulation of human flesh. 

Somehow, despite its pure mechanical feature, the cybernetic arm didn’t feel so entirely unhuman. Roy always carried it like it was a part of himself, it’s more than just a prosthesis to him, more than just a portable arsenal; the kid was living with it everyday, there’s more life in it than in the image of skin from the masking device.

“If you still want this when you’re seventeen, then yeah, let’s do it,” he continued, after both the warm hand and the cold one returned his squeeze briefly on the table. “But you don’t have to wait with me on this, you can go see some other teenager and have sex with them if you want.”

Roy raised his eyebrows in a doubtful manner, “Isn’t it also illegal for teens to have sex with each other?”

“Yeah, but I don’t usually feel like I could put the hurt in someone younger than myself.”

A sniff slipped out from Roy, who curled his lips presently into a lopsided smile while saying in a slow voice, “...I can wait. It’s only a couple of months anyway. I can keep myself from trying to have illegal sex with anyone, as long as you also don’t get to get laid in the meantime.”

Jason returned his smile quickly with genuine ease. “Alright, deal.”

***

For some moments, with Roy sitting astride his partner on the couch, they remained grazing their lips and hands here and there on each other, until finally Jason rose onto his feet, and up he was brought by a pair of strong arms, one of which fastened itself around his back to hold him tight to the front of the guy while the other one drew his leg up behind the guy’s hips with its hand.

“Hey you know I don’t like this,” Roy tipped his head to frown disapprovingly at the big guy; his arms maintained on the guy’s shoulders, not wrapped around the guy but just hanging over him with his free leg drooping down to the floor, in a clear way that showed he did not agree to be carried around like a teddy bear out of all humiliating postures to be carried.

His disagreement and lack of cooperation was little deterrence to Jason. “You said it’s growing on you.”

It was likely that Jason was lying to confuse him. He didn’t remember saying that to the guy, although it might be true that it was growing on him.

Nevertheless, he said, “That still doesn’t mean I like it now.”

“Well I like it,” replied Jason crisply with a smirk on his face, while continuing to bring the two of them into their used-to-be shared bedroom.

While he and Jason had reverted to their old habit of smooching each other, he didn’t return to sleep in the old room during the past months.

His drooped leg swung up to join his already hooked leg around Jason, keeping the guy close upon him once he had been laid down on the bed in the room which was still currently Jason’s own.

A thoughtful expression appeared on the guy’s face, just as their clothes and pants had been removed and their underpants were about to.

“I just remember,” started Jason solemnly, drawing off from Roy a little; his big hands dropped on the front of Roy’s boxer briefs instead of continuing to get him out of the increasingly suffocated cloth. “The legal age of consent in LA is actually eighteen.”

“This had better just be you _failing_ to be funny,” Roy scowled at him, pretty sure that the guy was only saying this right now to be annoying.

“No, seriously, it’s true,” Jason answered with a shake of his head, his fingers brushing about the thin and dampening fabric of Roy’s briefs in an innocent, absent-minded way.

“If you’re going to tell me I need to wait for another freaking year, forget it, big guy,” Roy grumpily replied, his legs shifted to lift his crotch closer to the brushing fingers despite him. “I’m gonna have sex tonight, with or without you.”

“It’s that a threat, little Red?” The brushing fingers were replaced by some light squeezes from a firm hand. “‘Cause you know I don’t respond nicely to threats.”

He snorted and threw the guy an unmoved look, “You don’t scare me.”

“No?”

The hand slid down into his boxer briefs. He bit back a gasp and said, “Nope.”

“Oh, well, so it’s true I can’t scare you,” with a smirk the guy crouched down closely to him again, his teeth scratching across the shell of Roy’s ear as he uttered in a drawling voice, “...But I bet I can still make you scream.”

A small bite prickled Roy right under his ear at the end of Jason’s words, causing him to twist and leak a little with anticipation in the warm hold of the big calloused hand. 

With his arms thrown around the guy, he shoved his mouth swiftly onto Jason’s neck, baring his teeth against the hot skin as he sucked in a sharp breath crammed with the familiar, exhilarating scent of his partner. “...You’re all talk,” he managed briefly.

“You like to hear me talk,” replied Jason, with a smug curve on his lips pressing close to Roy’s ear. “But you’re right, why should I be talking right now when I can just get you to scream and squirm for me.” Then down he slithered from under Roy’s arms, sprinkling bits of kisses over Roy in his way to settle himself between Roy’s legs.

The hand around Roy moved away for an instant to draw his boxer briefs off him. A quick lick struck Roy in his top once he was exposed, turning him shaking and gasping immediately to full hardness.

At the shoot of unfamiliar pleasure, his eyes grew wide and his hands clenched down on the sheet of the bed; his legs squirmed to drive himself closer to where the sweet lick was from. 

Both of Jason’s arms bent pressing down his squirming legs with their elbows on his thighs. Little strokes and squeezes were given to the soft parts beneath Roy’s hardness, while the guy was continuing to strike him all over with more short or long licks from that obviously sadistic tongue of his.

It wasn’t until a few excruciating moments later after Roy had turned from grunting to rasping to kind of whining at the guy for more did Jason decide that he had had enough fun torturing him and seized Roy with his smirking mouth in a full, hot suction that he all but screamed for.

He wasn’t very proud of the noises he gave into the suction. He tried to hold his voice down at first, but whenever he accidentally let out a shaken noise, it would be rewarded with a deep, approving hum against his length which only made him cry out more.

Just before he was finished, he struggled up onto his elbows, straining his eyes to look down with a wild gaze at Jason, to watch him. 

A billowing heat swept through Roy at the contact with the blue eyes--riveted on him while the guy was working him with his mouth, flashing and drilling into him with an almost cutting intensity in their blueness that made the inside of Roy tighten at once and pushed him off of his elbows to lying flat on his back again in a burst coming.

In the midst of his burst, the word _“Jay”_ was shot out acutely, while his flesh hand was grasping down for a hand of Jason that met it right up and attached itself to its hold.

The pressure around Roy didn’t ease off, nor did the hand clasped with his flesh hand move away, until every drop of him was given out and drunk clean.

A quick moment later, while he was lying slack with his eyes gazing blankly upon him and his limbs sprawling loose on the bed in his blissful recovery, Jason moved to reach for something in his bedside drawer.

Not prepared to have a slick finger slipped inside him, Roy snapped his head up from the bed to Jason, who at once sank to some nervous guilt at his shocked face.

“Well I just thought,” the guy fumbled shortly. Then with a shake of his head, he withdrew his finger from Roy, “We don’t uh, we don’t need to do this.” 

“What? No, let’s do this,” Roy promptly replied, “I want to do this. I was just a little surprised, that’s all. You could’ve given me a heads-up, you know.”

“No, it’s okay,” Jason shook his head again while saying in an easy manner, “we don’t need to do this right now, or ever, if you’re not feeling it. We could do something else.”

Roy rolled his eyes. “Come on, Jay,” his knees bent up at the sides of Jason to fix him fast between his legs, as he tossed the guy a mildly jeering look for his sudden and not especially attractive wimpiness, “I thought you’re a Robin, not a _chicken_.”

A smile spread over Roy’s face at the immediate change of Jason’s expression.

“Chicken,” the guy scoffed at him grimly, his handsome face wearing none of the previous concern and kind understanding but merely a dangerous look that gave rise of another stir of anticipation in Roy. “...The _nerves_ you have; and to think I was going to let you off easy.”

“What made you think I want you to let me off easy,” retorted Roy, a glimmer of a smile crossing his mouth, “I want you, big guy, to give me everything you’ve got.”

With a feverish spark in his blue eyes that made Roy tingle in the nicest way, the guy flashed up to press his mouth hard against Roy’s, while one of his big, firm hands seized Roy’s leg by its ankle and bent it further up to the side to make way for the thick, lubed finger of his other hand to dig itself back inside him.

There’s no pain he felt from the finger, with it being all lubed and himself not being the most sensitive to pain for a long time. 

Honestly, he didn’t think he was feeling anything from it at all; nothing an examination by a doctor wouldn’t make him feel, which was a little disappointing. He had kind of expected something more, something that would excite him and drive him twisting as good as before.

He wanted to like it, to enjoy this with Jason. How was he supposed to truly enjoy this with the guy if he didn’t feel--

“... _Oh_.”

Roy’s eyes widened, almost in shock at the sharp, staggering sensation hitting him on a sudden as Jason pressed his finger deeper and scratched its tip across a hidden spot inside him which, catching his reaction at once with narrowly watching eyes, the guy scratched again unhesitatingly with his finger.

As again he was hit and uncontrollably groaning out in a breathless pleasure, the face of Jason beamed down at him in a childish, savage delight that was painfully adorable yet actually stirring up a bit of fear in Roy, who reckoned without a doubt that another great torture was coming.

Leaving him no time to recover from the last hit, the finger pressed Roy hard in his spot with terrible accuracy--Abruptly he twitched up, didn’t even notice that another slick, thick finger slipped inside him until two fingers were squirming to stretch him together, neither of which pressing him hard and good for the second time, but merely nudging and grazing him over and over in his spot with consistent, tormenting lightness that gave him nothing but a pinch of the sensation he was aching to catch in full.

Dragging himself up a little with his right arm over Jason’s shoulder, he stretched down his left hand, not to grab that once again hardening of his own, but to grab at Jason, who had yet been out of his own black boxer briefs at the moment.

A low and much delicious groan fell out from Jason’s mouth as Roy, wanting to touch him as well as to retaliate, slipped his hand swiftly inside his briefs and reached his damp, weighty hardness that gave an instant twitch at the touch of Roy’s fingers.

The thing felt so wonderful; immediately he was swollen with an urge to feel more of it, the whole of it, to seize it, to taste it--

Only before he could do anything more than brushing his fingers upon it, his hand was suddenly snatched out from Jason’s briefs by the guy’s spare hand around its wrist. 

“Not now, Roy, you can play with it all you want later, now I’ve got plan for us,” rumbled Jason’s hoarse voice, followed by a quick, sloppy lick over the palm of Roy’s fully feeling hand; then with his own larger hand shifting from Roy’s wrist to clasp his hand in full and pushing it right up over his buzzed head on the bed, the guy continued to stretch him for what felt like an eternity.

At long last, seeing that he was thoroughly tormented as well as stretched, the guy removed his fingers from Roy and turned to prepare himself quickly.

A deep, raspy _“fuck”_ lurched out from Jason’s mouth once he was inside Roy. His eyes screwed shut; he went still for a moment, breathing heavily through his moist and burning mouth with his head lolled down on Roy’s forehead.

Slowly, having calmed himself, the guy stretched his eyes open and heaved his head up a little to check with him, “...You all good, babe?”

Despite the forever stretching and Jason’s slow and careful movement in entering him, there’s still a bit of pain he felt from being strained to his fullest capacity by the thickness of his partner; it was nothing he couldn’t easily handle, however.

In reply he gave an affirmative hum to Jason, before it sank into him. “‘Babe’?” His brows wrinkled in skeptical bemusement. “Why did you just call me that?”

“It’s just, you know, what everyone always says while making love,” lisped Jason above him in a distracted manner.

He hadn’t really thought about how they were going to call this. So it was “making love”, not banging or screwing, he liked that.

He didn’t like the “babe” thing a lot, though. “Don’t call me that,” he grumbled, with as much lucidity as he could maintain under the strange, consuming sensation of being filled completely by his partner; “...‘babe’, that’s dumb; that can be like, anyone. How can I tell you’re not just saying that in my face while secretly thinking about...let’s say, a big, red-haired Amazon babe.”

“I would think that everyone can tell that red-haired Amazon babe is a hardcore _lesbian_ ,” Jason’s expression turned more focus with some ironic amusement.

“Then what did you flirt with her for?” Roy questioned briefly.

“I didn’t flirt with her, I was just being friendly,” replied the guy, then with the corner of his mouth stretching up, he began a little slow grinding motion inside Roy. “...No big Amazon redhead or anything, I promise you that; only a little redhead.”

“Not little,” stated Roy’s voice plainly through a suppressed groan, “totally normal size.”

“Sure, whatever you say, _little Red_ ,” rejoined Jason, with a soft chuckle and not a break in the slow, steady motion below his waist, “-- _Chico Rojo. Petit ami rouge_.” A hot flare slashed through Roy as a slow grind struck him right in his spot; the smirking lips upon him dropped their smirk and brushed themselves swiftly across his gasping mouth, at the same time Jason continued uttering to him, his voice deepened significantly into a hoarse whisper, “...Mon beau soleil.”

With both his cybernetic hand behind Jason’s shoulder and his flesh hand in Jason’s own hand tightening their grasp on the guy, he thrust himself down urgently, to sink the thickness of his partner as deep inside him as he could, to ask for it to move more, _more and faster and harder_ \--

He had been to France with Ollie enough times in the past for him to understand completely what the guy had just referred to him as. He had never been anyone’s “sun” before, beautiful or not; under any other circumstances he would’ve probably found it cheesy and embarrassing, any other circumstances where he wasn’t gripped in whole by the sensation of being combined with the guy, of having the guy added to his sum. 

He might very well have also babbled something embarrassingly cheesy himself, if he didn’t get thrown quickly into a wordless whirl as Jason proceeded to move faster and harder with escalating abandon.

While concentrating on their motion below, the guy kept his left hand locked with Roy’s flesh hand over his buzzed head on the bed.

The only hand of Roy that remained free at the moment was the cybernetic hand, whose cold hard metal certainly didn’t provide the most desirable touch. However, having long since returned to full hardness and aching for much more than the aggravating friction against the muscle of Jason’s stomach heaving up and down across him as the guy was pushing himself back and forth, Roy began to desire even the cold metallic touch of his own cybernetic hand.

He was almost about to lower his right hand from behind Jason’s shoulder to give himself the release that the guy didn’t seem to have any intention to help him with, when eventually his left hand was drawn down by Jason, rising close to his own burst, to hurl him right up to his second release under Jason’s hand with the guy reaching the release of his own at nearly the same time.

“...Awesome,” uttered Roy a little later, with his eyes gazing up at the roof of the room in dazed amazement, after he and Jason had both finished and the guy had slumped down all loose over him on the bed in content repose.

At his remark the guy chuckled, before he pried himself slowly off Roy to lie beside him on his own back.

It was too early for sleep right now, but the activity with Jason had made Roy a little drowsy and he felt that he could very much just close his eyes and sleep. Only he didn’t think he had the muscle in him to crawl through the long way to his own bed in the workshop...or had any desire to.

The bed he was lying on with Jason here was completely comfortable, he didn’t want to leave.

“Hey,” he started again while looking around at Jason, who turned to meet his eyes with a most pleasant expression on his face; “is it cool if I move back into this room with you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Great,” said Roy with satisfaction, “‘Cause I love it here.”

Jason gave him a warm, beautiful smile, “And I love that you’re here.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a kudos if you enjoy this!


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